The up.time IT Systems Management Blog

up.time 6 – Get Your Sneak Peek at our New Baby!

October 6th, 2011 Alex Bewley

The up.time 6 launch is just around the corner (end of the month)! So, we wanted to give you a sneak peek of what to expect. This new release is all about one thing; helping you monitor and manage your VMware environment better. Our development team has worked hard make VMware monitoring and management as easy as possible for IT departments, because we know you don’t have a lot of time on your hands.

In addition to the new VMware monitoring and reporting capabilities, up.time 6 continues to deeply monitor across all datacenter infrastructure and applications to give you the most complete set of metrics on performance, availability, and capacity. You’ll have full control over your servers and services across Windows, UNIX (IBM AIX, Sun Solaris, HP), Linux, VMware, Novell, and more from a single dashboard.

Here’s a quick preview into two of the major additions that will be included in up.time 6:

SMART Monitoring

1. Smart VMware Monitoring. We’ve taken a “Set it and forget it” approach with these new functionalities, allowing IT guys to save some of their time on virtualization monitoring. This includes:

  • Real-time vSync: To ensure your monitoring is fluid with your VMware environment. This will allow you to immediately know when VMs are added or changed with monitoring and alerting that’s automatically applied.
  • Sprawl Control: Be alerted and take automated action on new VMs, including license validation, resource allocation, and security compliance.
  • VM Power Awareness: Monitor power usage in your VMware environment to track energy savings initiatives, isolate power gobbling applications and workloads, and to map power usage to capacity over time.

 

up.time 6 Capacity Planning2. Comprehensive VMware Capacity Planning. We know that the #1 driver of your VMware performance is Capacity, so we’ve been working hard to make VM capacity planning easier. A huge problem across the systems management space is that IT professionals need to know how much capacity they have in their VMware environment, how much they’re currently using, and where the capacity bottlenecks are – and most importantly, when they’re going to run out so that they can prepare for future requirements.  Up.time 6 has addressed these problems by adding:

  • Capacity Bottleneck Trouble-Shooting, which will alert the minute a capacity bottleneck appears so you can regain control by locating them, in minutes, with deep, easy to use (3-click) capacity metrics.
  • Global VMware Capacity Reports, which will allow you to easily see and compare historical capacity trends across VMware (clusters, resource pools, vApps, VMs, ESX hosts, vCenters, Datacenters, and more) to help establish baselines for upgrade or consolidation projects and ensure that you never overspend on, or run out of, capacity again.
  • Virtual Capacity Forecasting. Stop getting caught begging for additional capacity and storage. Our new forecasting will allow you to easily and accurately see when virtual capacity will run out long before it pops up and bites you. It will find the users and business units who are over allocating or inefficiently using storage so that you can address their work practices.

I’m really excited for this release and the functionality that it brings to the table, and I think our clients will be more than pleased with what’s to come!

If you’re looking for a closer look at what I’ve talked about and/or want to see some of this functionality in action, our Product Manager is hosting a “Sneak Peek” webinar today (Oct. 6th) at 4pm EST that I recommend you attend. To register, click here.

- Alex

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This is your brain on up.time

July 4th, 2011 Mike Orloff

Remember those commercials?  I have recently been spending a fair bit of time in our Knowledge Base (KB) and it occurs to me that our KB is sort of like our collective brain in terms of storing product information and other useful tips, hints and mini how to guides.  Unfortunately, like the brain in those commercials, our KB has recently been (ahem) on a bit of a hiatus.

So several weeks ago I said: hold on, let’s do something to enhance all data, yesterday!  Since that time we have been working on 4 key initiatives.

First, we’re working to update content to ensure that subject matter reflects current product versions. For example, there are 7 new articles that cover various aspects of installation and platform support related to our new 5.5 release.  There have also been numerous updates to many older articles and elimination of articles that are no longer relevant.

Next, to make it easier for active KB users to catch up on recent material, we have provided a new KB home page with lists of recently added articles, the most highly rated and most viewed articles as well as the traditional opportunity to browse by subject.

We’re also reviewing how the KB material is organized and working towards a shift from broad technical areas to more specific topics that I hope will relate more closely to how our clients actually use up.time and seek support for the product.  Clearly real active imagination goes far in new nomenclature.  So we have tried to be creative in setting up the new hierarchy.

Finally, we have launched a new online troubleshooting tool to help leverage KB content into a triage model that is intended to help guide users more easily towards an answer, resolution or at least some guidance in their next steps in seeking support.  We’re still in the early stages of building out this capability and there is still lots of work to be done but I think we’re on the right track in sparking up our KB and online support tools.  If you have the chance to browse the KB and test out the troubleshooter, I’d be interested in receiving your feedback.

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Plug-In to the up.time Grid

June 6th, 2011 Mike Orloff

You know those questions that are easy to answer altruistically because the scenario on which the question is based seems entirely unlikely? For example, if you won a big pile of money in the lottery, would you donate a bunch to charity? Keep that thought in mind and read on.

up.time’s flexible architecture is one aspect of the product that I think a lot of our clients really like.  This capability facilitates the addition of plug-in monitors, custom modifications and other product enhancements.  Some of our clients leverage this functionality to significantly enhance the overall value up.time delivers to their business, others find the standard out of the box up.time product provides everything they need.  According to our recent survey, the former group represents almost 33% of our client base and from those clients I hear the occasional lament that custom developments are not widely shared by the uptime community.

Well, hold steady, we’re going to build something this summer.  Within the next 30 days we will be launching the Grid, a public site where uptime users can retrieve, rate, comment on and share plug-ins and other uptime modifications.  The Grid will also provide a forum for uptime clients to request plug-ins and share thoughts on requests.

We’re building the Grid for our clients and we will monitor and maintain the site but our hope and expectation is that it will provide a forum for uptime users to come together, share new product capabilities and maximize their up.time experience through an active and collaborative user community.

Now, about that original question: 86% of our clients that have developed plug-ins said they would be willing to at least consider sharing their modifications on an uptime community site.  Now that this scenario will soon be realistic and practical rather than strictly theoretical, I hope you will follow through, contribute to the Grid and help enhance the up.time experience for yourself and your fellow users.

Stay positive and stay tuned for further details.

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The Cost of Cloud – Part 3: Testing in the Cloud

June 1st, 2011 Alex Bewley

Cloud Capacity and Cloud TestinAs the conclusion to my 3 part Cost of Cloud Follow-up (click here to read part 1, click here for part 2), I wanted to focus on development and testing in the cloud and what questions you need to answer before beginning any tests.

 

Example #3 – Development and Testing in the Cloud: Although spinning up new test and development environments in the cloud improves agility, the essential questions to ask are:

 

  • Internal or Cloud: Is it more cost-effective to host the application or service internally or in the cloud? Can IT prove its decision?
  • Which Cloud is Best: Which cloud vendor should be chosen?
  • How Much will it Cost: How much will this service/workload cost month over month?
  • Failsafe Cloud Alerting and Reports: Additionally, the added problem of developers forgetting to de-commission cloud infrastructure and services drives major cost overruns. Proper notification of these ‘cloud zombies’ is essential to prevent large bills over time.  While services like Amazon’s AWS are an incredible boon to being able to create development and test environments in a few clicks, there are latent costs which aren’t always readily apparent – stopped instances still consume storage resources (and cost), snapshots linger even when volumes are deleted (and add more cost), just to name a few. IT needs better visibility.

As stated earlier (part 1), there are no tools that can help IT (or LOBs) model the cost of their cloud needs, predict their workload costs or notify when costs are escalating. However, there are tools coming in the future.

The most fundamental aspect of optimizing performance monitoring in the cloud is to understand the relationship between application/infrastructure performance and cost. Presently, the industry is just beginning to understand how to monitor the performance of applications in the cloud, yet it lacks a cloud costing dashboard necessary for IT managers to make smart budget related decisions. How can organizations understand the cost of cloud computing without a deeper level of visibility? It has become crucial for IT to tie cloud success to cost analysis, as well as overall system performance.

Conclusion: So to Cloud or Not to Cloud? How will you tie your cloud decisions to cost for justification to senior management? Or will you just deploy and cross your fingers?

Alex

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Quick update:

We have just launched uptimeCloud (beta) – the simple way to manage cost and capacity in the cloud. This new SaaS product will provide real-time, dynamic cloud cost monitoring, cloud cost forecasting, and cloud capacity management. for more, visit www.uptimecloud.com

 

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Posted in cloud, cloud cost, Cloud Cost Monitoring, cloud monitoring | 2 Comments »

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The Cost of Cloud – Part 2: Applications in the Cloud

May 25th, 2011 Alex Bewley

As part 2 of my Cost of Cloud Follow-up (click here to read part 1), I wanted to focus on applications in the cloud and what you need to see, report on and predict future cloud costs.

 

Example #2 – Applications in the Cloud:

  • See Cloud Cost: IT needs to see a clear monthly workload cost of their entire Amazon AWS deployment (by server, application or service) before they get the bill. For those companies that have deployed in AWS, the anxiousness and pain associated with the monthly AWS bill can be quite frustrating.
  • Predict Cloud Cost: Reports are needed that can estimate or predict the cost of running an application or service in AWS before it’s deployed. Predicting cloud cost based on individual workloads, applications or services is essential.
  • Identify Cloud Ready Applications: Reporting that can show which workloads are prime candidates for cloud deployment would be extremely helpful to IT departments wrestling with how to use cloud most effectively.

    If you have any questions about how you accomplish any of the above, let me know by posting a comment.

    Alex.

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    Quick update: We have just launched uptimeCloud (beta) – the simple way to manage cost and capacity in the cloud. This new SaaS product will provide real-time, dynamic cloud cost monitoring, cloud cost forecasting, and cloud capacity management. for more, visit www.uptimecloud.com

     

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    Posted in cloud, cloud cost, Cloud Cost Monitoring, cloud monitoring | 1 Comment »

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    The Cost of Cloud – Part 1: Cloud Cost Analysis

    May 18th, 2011 Alex Bewley

    Clost of Cloud, Cloud CostAs a follow-up to my cost of cloud computing post that had a large response, I decided to do a follow-up cloud cost analysis. This is part 1 of a 3 part series that will be posted over the next few weeks.

    The ultimate goal of deploying application or dynamic infrastructure to the cloud is the truly agile and cost-competitive nature of running and managing applications and infrastructure. However, cost can increase exponentially without proper cloud monitoring and cloud cost modeling. It has become crucial for IT to tie cloud success to cost analysis, in addition to overall system performance. This article will provide some common pitfalls and pains around current gaps in cloud costing and deployment, as well as a key set of questions to help IT make smart cloud decisions.

    Up to now, the success of applications in cloud, virtual and physical environments have been viewed in only two dimensions – availability and performance. However, perhaps the most important dimension is cost, and it’s cost that will dramatically influence what, when and where IT organizations deploy to the cloud. Presently a major gap is in tooling, where no cloud monitoring tools can help IT and LOBs monitor their cloud costs, predict workload/application cost, notify when costs are escalating, as well as provide standard cloud performance and availability monitoring. However, we do see this tooling issue changing in the near future.

    To date, companies have been oblivious to the workload cost of an application running in the cloud, apart from unclear monthly billing. We are entering a new era where performance and availability will be baseline requirements, but workload cost efficiency will be the new key to success. This will be the age of ‘economic compute’ and will be defined by how and where companies can run workloads at the best cost (assuming performance and availability remain constant). It won’t matter if it’s internally run on physical or virtual servers, or in the cloud, as the economics will drive this decision. However, the lynch pin to this costing decision model is missing…

    To responsibly manage IT budgets, companies need visibility to the cost and performance data of workloads, applications and dynamic infrastructure services. However, the industry is missing a complete toolset or product suite that can help IT easily see and predict the cost of cloud deployment. Applications and services can be deployed on cloud infrastructure (assuming it returns acceptable performance and availability), but it’s essential for IT to have clear visibility to what the workloads will cost comparatively, across different cloud vendors or even the cost of an internally run workload. How can IT make a cost-conscious decision without the basic cost data of an application, workload or service? Quite simply, it can’t. This is part one of a three part series where the idea of the economic cloud comes into play:

    Example #1 – Dynamic Infrastructure Services:

    • Ensure IT Doesn’t Overpay: A company may have provisioned a $500 per month system, but if its CPU is only consumed 10 percent of the time, then one is largely over paying. Now scale that scenario out to a company that is running many services, applications and servers in the cloud.
    • Companies with Many Separate Cloud Accounts: For IT managers trying to understand the cumulative costs of many developers or departments (LOBs) with cloud accounts, it can be almost impossible, with no clear means of reconciling usage (until it’s too late).
    • Manage Cost Across Geographically Dynamic Workloads: For more advanced scenarios, there are now a number of services that allow the creation of cloud instances in specific geographic regions, which enables a new generation of smartphone or mobile applications to exist.  There are millions of smartphone users in the world in non-North American geographies, such as Latin America – imagine if you could dynamically and geographically provision cloud resources that are compute heavy, or can service the requests of these remote smartphone clients, in a cost effective manner.  This reduces bandwidth requirements, increases the response time and can be done on cheaper, temporarily available compute resources. This kind of dynamism is incredibly powerful, yet monitoring the changing costs and performance of these cloud resources is going to be a difficult problem to solve.

    Stay tuned over the next few weeks for more examples of where the economic cloud comes into play and please, let me know your feedback/questions by posting a comment.

    Until next week…

    Alex

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    Quick update: We have just launched uptimeCloud (beta) – the simple way to manage cost and capacity in the cloud. This new SaaS product will provide real-time, dynamic cloud cost monitoring, cloud cost forecasting, and cloud capacity management. for more, visit www.uptimecloud.com

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    Posted in cloud, cloud cost, Cloud Cost Monitoring, cloud monitoring, Cloud Virtualization | 3 Comments »

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    Amazon outage and greater awareness raising

    April 28th, 2011 Alex Bewley

    Amazon was in the news this week, for all the wrong reasons — who wants to be associated with a massive outage and loss of customer data.  Having said this, the event has caused a great amount of hand-wringing and awareness raising around the limitation of cloud based services.  Let’s call it Amazon’s pets.com moment, the bubble of unlimited compute with perceived one hundred percent availability and storage reliability has been burst.  Yes, there will be a corresponding pull-back and introspection around deploying into the cloud, but this kind of cataclysmic event serves a great purpose – education.

    Cloud is convenient, cloud is dynamic, cloud is cool; but the romance is over, and now it’s time to figure out how can you effectively use it knowing the risks.  In the mid-enterprise market, private datacenters are not going away any time soon and the current Amazon outage indicates that not all data is best housed in the cloud.  How are you going to decide what goes where, and just as importantly, how are you going to monitor your physical, virtual, and cloud assets?

    Alex

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    up.time in the News!

    April 15th, 2011 Alex Bewley

    As usual, I’m negligent in writing my blog entries, but I just wanted to say thanks to David Strom, who did a quick video review of up.time on his blog (http://strom.wordpress.com) — he talks about service monitoring with up.time.

    In other news, we were a product finalist for the CODiE awards, which is a great achievement.  In fact, in just looking at our awards page, the list is really getting long now (http://www.uptimesoftware.com/server-monitoring-review.php), kudos to our team!   I’m really pleased that up.time continues to gain traction, sell like crazy, and solve customer problems.

    Alex

    Posted in uptime | 3 Comments »

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    The Continued Pursuit of Happiness

    March 21st, 2011 Mike Orloff

    Like the hibernating bear, I have been hunkered down in my lair (office) for most of the past fall and winter; not sleeping (much) but looking inward at how our client services team operates and how we interface with our clients.

    It’s hard to believe that it’s been 8 months since I blogged about the pursuit of “happyness.”  Since that time the British Prime Minister has tasked his Office for National Statistics with devising a happiness survey.  Coca-Cola has proclaimed itself “one of the original purveyors of happiness” and announced it will sponsor a cross-country study that will ask Canadians what makes them happy in an effort to help support development of a Gross National Happiness index (perhaps more optically important than GDP in these tough economic times).

    Clearly uptime isn’t the only corporate (or political) entity interested in measuring client (or constituent) satisfaction.  However, I do think we do more to respond and react than the average bear.

    As mentioned in that blog post, we received a tremendous response to our client services survey last spring.  Overall we seem to be doing quite well but we learned a lot about what’s important to our clients and where we have opportunities to improve our level of service.

    Over the past 6 months we have made significant changes to many of our systems and processes.  Some of these improvements are (I hope) directly visible to our clients such as more frequent communication, better dialogue when opening cases on our Support portal and faster response times.  However, most changes were applied to internal operations with the intention of addressing those important areas our clients told us about.

    Over the next year we plan to focus on more external initiatives and work on providing some of the tactical services, tools and materials that our clients are asking for.  Watch for further improvements to our Support portal as well as a range of new services that I hope will help add value to your up.time deployment (and make you happy!).

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    The Art of Monitoring the Black Box – Application Monitoring

    March 14th, 2011 Kenneth Cheung

    Frequently when talking about systems management, I try to highlight the concept of “smart monitoring” vs. “dumb monitoring”.

    Smart monitoring or what I term “Data center intelligence” focuses on the idea that just having a huge list of metrics (cpu, memory, disk) collected by your monitoring solution is not enough to really solve the real challenges in the data center.

    Sure having basic monitoring will get you out of “break fix”, and enable you to do cool things like capacity benchmarking, capacity planning and virtualization planning, but they do not enable you to do what I like to call “laser guided troubleshooting” from an application perspective. Remember, to users, applications are a “black box”, they don’t care, nor should they care about what underlying infrastructure powers that app.

    Let’s look at a real world example, when is the last time you had a marketing user call into the helpdesk and say “I think the marketing application I’m using is slow because the Cisco ASA is dropping packets, and actually I think it feels like the database is experiencing some lock waits”?.

    This is like asking when you last saw unicorns and fairies.

    This example underlines a fundamental truth in IT, users do not care, and shouldn’t have to care about how an application is delivered.

    Users are going to call you and say only 1 of 2 things – “the app is slow” or “the app is down”.

    Wouldn’t it be cool if your monitoring solution knew when and why an application was performance impacted or availability impacted BEFORE the users call the help desk?

    What would you be able to do in terms of outage avoidance if your systems management solution could do automated healing actions in the case of a performance impacting event?

    What would the difference in problem resolution be if the right team was notified with the right information? Would we still have the finger pointing across different teams (application, network, virtualization, database)?  Would we still have to run dozens of point tools and profilers to solve the problem that the user is telling us about?

    What kind of conversations could you have across different app teams, OP teams, and IT Management teams if you knew exactly what the contributing factors were to application downtimes?

    These are all important to ask yourself when you are selecting a systems management solution. Most importantly you need a systems management solution that helps you “get out of the weeds”, something that lets you think of applications holistically – and that gives you full coverage of the entire application stack regardless of platform, device, or virtualization platform in play.

    Here’s a quick 3 minute video on the topic, but up.time will also be holding an “application management” webinar which will help answer some of the above questions in much more detail. Click here to register.

    My advice is, get yourself some “smart monitoring” so that you’ll never have to wonder what the call telling you that “E-Mail is Slow” or “Application X is down” means – you’ll already be in the know.

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