Sourcing Advanced and Application Monitoring

Transcription

1 Sourcing Advanced and Application Monitoring Extensive Platform Support Event Monitoring Extensive, policy based event notification including automatic submission of help desk tickets Performance Reporting and Proactive Capacity Management Performance Analysis using Device Group Status Extensive, uncomplicated scalability Reporting Capability Management Portal Application instrumentation and monitoring is in its infancy. As with the Monitoring is a critical component of any world class IT operational process mix monitoring of infrastructure, the monitoring of applications is about defining what to monitor. Almost anything is possible. Most of the work should go into the activity of defining the mix of what is important and where is the most value realised? What is possible, practical and available? Environments seldom comprise one component, system, interface or dataflow. Environments are complex and the business requirements need to be completely understood. The Sourcing approach is to layer monitoring much like a pyramid one layer at a time until the appropriate level of value to the customer is achieved. If it costs more to monitor than the value derived, don t bother. Advanced Monitoring Sourcing starts at the base server monitoring layer. The second layer is to understand the environment from a functional, rather than a device perspective. Messaging is more than Exchange and is not a cluster of servers but rather the 25 or 30 systems that gather, process, analyse, store and forward the transactions. This example illustrates how the monitoring of the databases, mail and other core systems are to the overall monitoring of the environment. Understanding why Citrix is running slow for example entails more than monitoring the servers and network equipment. This is done by creating a monitoring service group across hardware, operating systems and base applications allowing for the monitoring of systems

2 and services rather than devices. The same principles Application Monitoring The next layer is to define the data flows between systems and the impact of delays, volumes, breakages, capacity and the like on the environment. These are instrumented and Sourcing prides itself on its ability to select the leading indicators those things that are important and add value included in the functional layer described above. For example, if we know that if we have more than 400 concurrent users, the typical result is a degradation of performance of the system, so let we advise monitoring concurrent users; or we know that a batch reporting process is dependent on an FTP transfer being completed by 10:00PM, we advise monitoring FTP completion time; or when the dataflow between MQ and the web server exceeds stops there is a clear transaction fault. These then could effectively be grouped in the service called online banking. It is important to spend the majority of project instrumentation time planning out and documenting these data flows and surrounding them with good monitoring instrumentation. The Sourcing OMA system apply as described above. provides the complete agent and server infrastructure for simplifying such instrumentation. The next layer is to embed counters into the application or create instrumented wrappers around the application and measure just about anything from number of transactions; to number of transactions posted; to the number of transactions posted by people with a surname beginning with Dashboards can be configured to display devices, groups of devices or even groups of tests M. Sourcing believe more and more applications will be instrumented with standards based performance counters such as WMI, JMX and others allowing for us to tap directly into them. The point this illustrates is that it is not the how that is complex, rather the what. What sets Sourcing apart is the concept described above where the outputs of application monitoring are simply treated the same as any other output - variable over time, pushed into the decision engine for analysis and stored Choice Sourcing (Pty) Ltd T/A Sourcing Page 2 of 5

3 for display and analysis. To Sourcing, transactions per hour is the same as the packets per second throughput through a router port. Our expert system, once configured for transactions per hour can easily find the needle problem in the haystack of transactions in any month, helping to focus the work administrators and operators. End User Response Monitoring Many IT organisations, despite their investments in infrastructure monitoring, find themselves reactive rather than proactive in responding to customer problems. These organisations are Combining Infrastructure and Application Performance Monitoring allows for an end-to-end real time business dashboard unintentionally using their customers as monitoring devices. Unfortunately, customers are the most expensive monitoring devices you can have. Infrastructure monitoring alone however cannot provide a complete picture of what the user is experiencing. End user management, often referred to as customer experience monitoring, is indispensable. End user management is essential to improving the customer experience and to move from a reactive to proactive state. Sourcing is able to monitor the end user experience through its application monitoring service. Monitoring as a Service The new generation Sourcing Service brings all the benefits of monitoring at a new, greatly reduced cost point, putting it in reach of most IT budgets. The infrastructure monitoring service is delivered using the Sourcing Operations Management Architecture (OMA). It uses architectures that are inherent in the devices or which are put in by Sourcing. This enables Sourcing to plug into the devices they monitor and ask a continual stream of relevant questions of the device. The answers to the questions are analysed for action and stored in a database for further analysis. Sourcing provides a GUI into your world, allowing for a complete picture to be presented of the environment from the server to the end user and everything in between. The aim is to be able to establish where to look as quickly as possible. This allows a new paradigm in problem management Choice Sourcing (Pty) Ltd T/A Sourcing Page 3 of 5

4 to be achieved. The very light footprint has almost no impact on the devices monitored. There are a large number of factors that can cause any device to run into trouble. To overcome this complexity, Sourcing has invested up to 70% of its R&D spend into defining performance profiles for differing types of devices. These profiles ensure what is being monitored on a particular device is both relevant and well understood by both monitoring and analysis personnel. Sourcing has developed a suite of new generation infrastructure and application monitoring solutions that span the IT environment Due to the variability of workload in infrastructure today, especially in server environments, the Sourcing OMA provides a decision engine that determines whether a device is healthy through a comparison of the device to a predefined profile. It manages fault identification and escalation and hierarchy directories are used to ensure root causes are identified when monitoring faults occur. Just about all monitored data are definable as variables over time. If this view of the world is taken, all devices, ports, flows, capacity, throughputs, errors etc. can be brought to a threshold state (does it exceed, equal/not equal, grow/shrink more/less than etc) over time (second, minute, hour, day, week, year, forever). This vastly simplifies the analysis of the available space on a hard drive or the time it takes to process a transaction on a server in Johannesburg as executed by a user in Cape Town or anything in between. Dynamically auto configured profiles per device, group or device type allow environment specific configurations to accurately and quickly produce the correct ratios of incidents and the appropriate capacity, and performance information. The list is almost infinite. The art form, which Sourcing prides itself on, is the ability to select those things that are important, termed leading indicators. A new paradigm in problem management Sourcing employs a polling Choice Sourcing (Pty) Ltd T/A Sourcing Page 4 of 5

5 methodology for the gathering of key performance indicators rather than using traps. This enables the collection of historical data of the organisation s environment over a period of time. This data can then be used through the OMA's comprehensive reporting facility to provide the required reports for trend analysis of: Capacity Planning Recurring Incidents Management Fault Analysis for Root Causes Control and maximise the availability of critical systems The Sourcing team has been involved in some of South Africa s largest services deals and collectively has more than 30 years in IT outsourcing. They have developed one of the most respected toolsets for the management of IT technology and will partner with you to enhance the productivity of your IT and the business it supports. About Sourcing Sourcing is a black empowered, South African specialist IT services company focused on providing monitoring solutions to medium and large companies as a service. Their client base includes some of the country s largest corporations, evidence that they have been successful in significantly penetrating their target market segments. Choice Sourcing (Pty) Ltd T/A Sourcing Page 5 of 5