System's Management Hairball
I've now been in this space for over 15 years, and while technology and tools have advanced at incredible rates, managing the technology is still a major pain. Here at uptime we've been diligently trying to make performance and availability monitoring as easy as possible, however it's a constant challenge. Sometimes I wish we could be like salesforce.com and become like a SaaS (software as a service) provider. Why? With SaaS, there is only one hosted code base and one hosted database (well, it's more complicated, but you get the idea), and this is running on hardware that you can control. In our case, where our software is out in the wild at many customer environments we are faced with huge versioning problems.
For example, we monitor Solaris, Linux (RedHat/SuSE), Windows, HP/UX, and AIX systems. We have to deal with code bases in our agents for all these platforms, now, add in platform specific issues (such as architectures, 32/64-bitness, kernel changes, tech releases) and you are asking for an exponential increase in issues. Now factor in all of the applications and services that we monitor (such as Oracle, SQL Server, Exchange, WebLogic, WebSphere) and their corresponding version upgrades. This is on top of our monitoring station support and the platforms and databases that it uses. Now introduce VMware (and other virtualization technologies) into the equation and you're in for a world of hurt. What does this mean? It means that companies in the system's management space, like uptime, spend considerable resources on simple software hygiene, time that could be better spent innovating. Unfortunately, this problem isn't going away any time soon, so we are constantly looking at other methods to simplify.
So, can system's management software become SaaS-like? In my opinion - no. What IT Manager in his/her right mind is going to allow an external vendor access to their secure internal environment, especially when the monitoring software is going to cut to the core of their production servers. This is also why application vendors such Oracle are starting to get into the management space, they know that intelligent management of the applications is where the money is at.
Next up, virtual server sprawl.
For example, we monitor Solaris, Linux (RedHat/SuSE), Windows, HP/UX, and AIX systems. We have to deal with code bases in our agents for all these platforms, now, add in platform specific issues (such as architectures, 32/64-bitness, kernel changes, tech releases) and you are asking for an exponential increase in issues. Now factor in all of the applications and services that we monitor (such as Oracle, SQL Server, Exchange, WebLogic, WebSphere) and their corresponding version upgrades. This is on top of our monitoring station support and the platforms and databases that it uses. Now introduce VMware (and other virtualization technologies) into the equation and you're in for a world of hurt. What does this mean? It means that companies in the system's management space, like uptime, spend considerable resources on simple software hygiene, time that could be better spent innovating. Unfortunately, this problem isn't going away any time soon, so we are constantly looking at other methods to simplify.
So, can system's management software become SaaS-like? In my opinion - no. What IT Manager in his/her right mind is going to allow an external vendor access to their secure internal environment, especially when the monitoring software is going to cut to the core of their production servers. This is also why application vendors such Oracle are starting to get into the management space, they know that intelligent management of the applications is where the money is at.
Next up, virtual server sprawl.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home