Taming Microsoft Environments with HP SiteScope Exchange and Active Directory Solution Templates

Transcription

1 Taming Microsoft Environments with HP SiteScope Exchange and Active Directory Solution Templates Quick and economical troubleshooting and performance management for Microsoft environments Business white paper

2 Table of contents Today s complex messaging environments...3 How do you monitor solutions effectively without becoming an expert?...4 The solution template approach to effective, efficient monitoring...4 Bringing the power of HP SiteScope to Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory...4 Going beyond the capabilities of individual monitors...5 Management extensions provided by HP SiteScope...6 The sooner you start, the sooner you get the benefits...6 About HP SiteScope HP SiteScope is an industry-leading, agentless monitoring solution used today by thousands of companies around the world for monitoring IT infrastructure components. It goes beyond simple systems monitoring, enabling IT to: Monitor a multitude of different devices and network bandwidth Monitor third-party applications and infrastructure software from Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and Siebel Integrate with other HP software to enhance system availability monitoring and incorporate the end-user experience HP SiteScope enables IT organizations to monitor availability and performance across the entire IT infrastructure with more than 85 standard monitor types that cover most mainstream hardware, operating systems, applications, application components, and networking equipment. It makes it possible to not only monitor a broad range of systems, but to also monitor at multiple levels. For a customer-facing web application, for instance, IT could monitor the availability of the website, whether or not the web server is handling the volume of requests, whether required services are running on the server, whether proper ports are open, how much space is available on the hard drive, and how well the server CPU is handling the load.

3 Is your IT team scrambling to manage , Microsoft SharePoint Foundation, SharePoint Server, Active Directory, Hyper-V, and VMware? Are your users calling with service-quality or mailbox quota issues? Has the task of deploying agents become a hassle? Do you need more control of your messaging environment? If the answer to any or all of these questions is yes, you re not alone. Collaboration and communication with customers, partners, and internal teams is a mission-critical business service these days. But managing the backbone, for many IT organizations, is a frustrating and costly process. It doesn t have to be though. With the right tools and the right approach, your IT organization can quickly simplify the management of your Microsoft messaging infrastructure. The ideal solution falls somewhere in between the simple tools supplied with messaging platforms most of which lack the functionality, scalability, and security that mission-critical application monitoring requires and heavy-duty solutions that monitor multi-vendor heterogeneous environments. The ideal solution delivers comprehensive, integrated, deep and broad monitoring capabilities. It is quick to install, easy to use, and expandable. And it yields fast ROI. Does it exist? Yes. It s called HP SiteScope. Combining the HP approach of agentless monitoring with HP SiteScope solution templates for commonly used business software such as Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and Siebel, HP SiteScope can complement your Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory utilities by providing extensions that broaden your management reach. In fact, Microsoft chose HP as its partner in joint development efforts to extend its own native tools. Based on our work with Microsoft, and our extensive experience with a wide range of customers who depend on Exchange and Active Directory for their business-critical messaging, we ve developed the HP SiteScope Exchange and Active Directory Solution Templates as two key offerings in our family of over 35 solution templates. They bring agentless, enterprise-class monitoring to your current and future Microsoft messaging components quickly, economically, and easily, without the need for domain expertise. Today s complex messaging environments Business messaging today is as complex as it is crucial. The effectiveness of messaging systems drives the effective use of public and private folders, global directories and groups, and the productivity of mobile and stationary workers. But you can t manage what you don t measure, and measurement must cover all components. Many of the native tools supplied with messaging systems don t easily extend beyond the core applications themselves. IT has to deploy addon management packages from diverse vendors, forcing administrators to go back and forth between multiple interfaces. Additionally, both the native tools themselves and the add-ons they require cause IT to spend money on training and consultants, to teach staff how and what to monitor in the complex matrix of systems, applications, and communication protocols. 3

4 Figure 1. HP SiteScope Exchange Solution Template software provides default monitors and metrics for key Exchange functions. So IT organizations find themselves caught between two undesirable alternatives. Spend the time it takes to learn new user interfaces, customize their enterprisescale monitoring solution, and integrate it with their messaging applications. Or hire administrators with domain expertise and use a vendor-provided utility as another data-feed to the overall monitoring solution further complicating an already complex mix of servers, network devices, applications and systems, and increasing total cost of ownership (TCO). How do you monitor solutions effectively without becoming an expert? What is needed, really, is something in between a low-cost, robust, full-featured monitoring solution that can be applied to messaging system monitoring without customization, complex integration, or additional hiring or training. For businesses that depend on Microsoft Exchange Server and Active Directory, HP supplies that ideal solution with HP SiteScope and Exchange and Active Directory Solution Template software. These solutions don t require you to rip and replace the monitoring software you already have installed. If you re already using native management tools, HP SiteScope will efficiently extend the reach of those tools. HP SiteScope will cover and complement all your current and future choices of Microsoft and other IT components, and provide the extensions you require to expand management, even to the hardware elements vital to the deployment. The solution template approach to effective, efficient monitoring HP s extensive experience in working with complex customer IT environments has shown us how important it is to know what needs to be monitored in each system or application. So we ve developed solution templates within our HP SiteScope monitoring offering not only for Microsoft product families such as Exchange, Active Directory, SQL Server, and.net, but also for popular business applications such as Oracle Database and leading application servers as well. HP SiteScope solution templates are a set of standard and solution-specific monitors that consist of default metrics, default thresholds, and proactive tests. Each solution template also includes a best-practices guide that explains the logic behind the default metrics and thresholds as well as a troubleshooting section that outlines the next steps to take in solving performance problems. These solution templates enable IT staff to rapidly deploy and activate multi-tiered performance monitoring for the IT elements and applications supporting key business services all without requiring IT administrators to be experts on the critical metrics for each target to be monitored. Bringing the power of HP SiteScope to Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory Microsoft Exchange Server and Active Directory are de facto standards for businesses seeking flexible and reliable messaging and directory solutions to lower costs, increase productivity, and provide anywhere access to business communications. HP SiteScope Exchange Solution Template software brings the robust capabilities of HP SiteScope to the monitoring and management of Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5, 2000, 2003, 2007, and 2010 without requiring Exchange expertise so that IT can efficiently troubleshoot Microsoft Exchange messaging solution problems and provide high performance levels. HP SiteScope Exchange Solution Template software zeros in on parameters that relate to the most common and serious Exchange problems, such as Outlookto-Exchange MAPI response time, Information Store communication, and mailbox usage statistics. And it monitors key application components such as the underlying hardware and operating system. This solution template enables IT to detect general performance problems between the mail client and the Microsoft Exchange Server during Exchange processing of and during the response from Exchange Server back to the client. The solution also includes a proactive Outlook client-to-exchange server test, which provides an early indicator of affected users and helps narrow troubleshooting. 4

5 Furthermore, HP SiteScope monitors the resources that support the Exchange environment, which means that operators obtain information on the health of all resources supporting Exchange as well as the health of Exchange itself. This visibility is key to reducing costs by helping operators determine whether issues are due to the Exchange server or the resources on which it depends. HP SiteScope is particularly useful when deploying Exchange in virtualized environments. Its broad monitoring scope brings federated alerts to a single console and shows the health of the application and the virtualized resources. This helps to accelerate triage and make it possible to fix issues before users and the business are impacted. For businesses that depend on Microsoft Active Directory as the main control point for their resources and users, HP Active Directory Solution Template software makes it possible to monitor the performance and health of domain controller key performance indicators (KPIs) such as CPU utilization, memory usage, and disk space, and of dependent services such as File Replication Service, netlogon, Kerberos Distribution Center, Windows Time, Intersite Messaging, and Systvol. It also makes it possible to run periodic proactive Active Directory replication tests. The HP SiteScope Exchange and Active Directory Solution Templates are based on technology that was used to test Exchange and other applications while they were under development at Microsoft. In addition, they incorporate best practices contributed by Microsoft and other industry experts as well as HP s own experience with, and knowledge of, Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory. The templates focus on the most critical aspects of application health and performance. Instead of overloading you with thousands of metrics and hundreds of reports, HP SiteScope focuses on what matters, setting up the measurement of parameters that relate to the most common and serious problems, and providing: Non-intrusive agentless monitoring to complement native tools Extension of MS-SCOM to provide essential capabilities such as web user-experience monitoring Specialized monitors for Exchange on VMware or Hyper-V and clusters Critical metrics that are enabled by default, such as round-trip mail time with the SiteScope MAPI monitor Expert and best practice-based predefined thresholds where applicable Event-log and service monitoring Proactive tests Best practice troubleshooting guides Evolution to full passive and active end-user monitoring, service-level management, and application performance management Going beyond the capabilities of individual monitors The HP SiteScope Microsoft solution templates deliver a researched set of monitoring capabilities tailored for Microsoft environments. These standard application-specific monitors have several advantages over disparate monitors. HP solution templates provide default metrics and built-in thresholds, come with best-practice documentation that specifies the most important KPIs and outline the best first steps for troubleshooting. They also include specific troubleshooting monitors all features that disparate, individual monitors typically lack. Key benefits include: Reducing the need for specialized Microsoft expertise, the time to configure and deploy monitors, and the number of monitoring points wasted on lowpriority metrics Helping IT staff to identify real-time performance bottlenecks and long-term trends, and speeding troubleshooting Providing descriptions of all metrics and, in many cases, why metrics are important Providing troubleshooting next steps in a specialized best-practice guide Monitoring of usage, not just Exchange application or server performance, to show how usage and real-time performance are related Deploying as a single entity, to reduce time to value and enable a holistic approach 5

6 Management extensions provided by HP SiteScope Increasingly, systems are embedded in business processes, ranging from order management in commercial organizations to public services such as libraries and medical supply. People board planes more easily, check out books and multimedia from libraries, order DVDs, and use social media to share family information. This means that people and businesses depend on for revenues, quality of service, and customer care, yet few if any check on a regular basis to determine whether their users can access their mail or whether the system is reacting properly. Again, you can t manage what you don t measure, so the user experience must be added to the management solution. The sooner you start, the sooner you get the benefits If Microsoft Exchange Server and Active Directory are key technologies for your business, then we can help you monitor them the way mission-critical applications should be monitored. HP SiteScope can give you fast time to value, reduced need for domain expertise, and lower total cost of ownership. For more information To learn more, contact your authorized HP Software Business Partner, HP sales representative, or visit us at HP SiteScope also makes it possible to monitor webbased access to , using recorded scripts to determine response times and correct behavior. Alerts can be generated to indicate issues to operators, before users dial in to complain about low quality of service, or even know a problem exists. Added to the solution templates, this capability of HP SiteScope extends the scope of measurement to place the whole business impact of Exchange-based services under constant scrutiny. Get connected Get the insider view on tech trends, alerts, and HP solutions for better business outcomes Copyright 2010 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein. Microsoft is a U.S. registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation. 4AA0-0693ENW, Created September 2010