The up.time IT Systems Management Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Application Monitoring’

The Cost of Cloud – Part 1: Cloud Cost Analysis

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011

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 »

The Art of Monitoring the Black Box – Application Monitoring

Monday, March 14th, 2011

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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Posted in Application Monitoring | No Comments »

5 Tips for Evaluating IT Systems Management Software

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

First off, I apologize as it’s been a while since my last post. The allure of the summer patio and the beautiful weather has taken its toll. But I’m back and ready to roll…

As I chat with customers and prospects at uptime software, it became clear that most IT professionals would find a  “Systems Management and Server Monitoring Evaluation Guide” very useful. So with that in mind, this blog is themed around how to better evaluate systems management and server monitoring software. We’ve found that our mid-enterprise customers (companies that have between 50-2,500 servers) have some common best practices when it comes to  evaluating various packages to monitor and manage their environment. So, without further ado, here are my “5 Tips For Evaluating IT Systems Management Software:”

1. Applications are becoming dynamic and complicated. Can your monitoring and performance software handle it?

Historically, it’s generally been fairly easy to monitor applications.  They sat on individual pieces of hardware and were relatively siloed.  Nowadays, applications are increasingly componentized and are being abstracted from the underlying hardware platforms.  Witness the prevalence of virtualizationtechnologies such as VMware, AIX LPARs, and Solaris zones, all of which are making great strides in widespread adoption.  It is now incumbent on systems managementvendors to understand these virtualization technologies in great detail and how they impact application monitoring and performance. Remember, your systems management and application monitoring tool should make application monitoring easier for you, not more complicated.

2. Heterogeneous platforms (Virtual, Physical and even Cloud) are the new normal. Your systems management software needs to be able to scale across them all.

In a mid-enterpriseshop, it’s highly unlikely that you’re a single platform and OS.  You’ll need to deal with hardware platforms of many vintages and architectures (and add in the network too).  Mix in virtualization and cloud and if you don’t have a fully features management and monitoring tool, you’re in for a world of grief. (shameless plug -  up.time can oversee all the platforms and environments). So, it’s best to ensure that the tools you are considering can cover all your platforms, both today and tomorrow.

3. Are you future proofing?  What about new technologies?

As technologies change, is your systems management tool ready to grow with you?  Virtualization was, and continues to be, a big disruptor and yet many vendors took years to understand how to introspect and monitor virtual environments.  With the advent of cloud and its adoption, a very similar problem is occurring again.  Can you get a single pane-of-glass for monitoring and managing what we call P-V-C (the physical, virtual, and cloud worlds) together?

4. Can you quickly evaluate and deploy?  Do you need lots of professional services?  Is the tool administration costing you an FTE?

We appreciate that extra time is something you probably don’t have the luxury of. So, at uptime software, we designed up.time to get up and running in under 15 minutes  We want to help you solve problems right away, not send a flock of consultants on-site to bleed you to death.  If you’ve had any experience with consultants (or lawyers), you’ll know what I mean.  I’ve heard our customers and prospects say loud and clear, that they don’t want a full-time admin to babysit and administer their monitoring tool. Is the solution you’re evaluating going to save you time or cost you an FTE to manage it?

5. The Last Tip is the most important. Trial, trial and ….trial. Before you talk to salespeople.

Make sure you fully trial the software before you get too far in the buying process. Don’t get caught being sold to through fancy demos, vapor-ware, and PowerPoint’s. Trial the tool, see what it does and how it acts in your environment. Sure, the marketing says how easy the tool is to use and install, and how deep the metrics are. Believe that and I have some swampland in Florida you might be interested in. If the trial is complicated, frustrating, and doesn’t do what you want, don’t expect the purchased tool to be any better. In fact, in most cases, it’s worse. Remember, it’s up to you to ensure your systems management tool is the right fit for your environment and needs. This is exactly why we provide a free trial at up.time. You don’t need to talk to a salesperson to get it, just download it straight off our website. You’ll be able to get up.time monitoringand reporting in less than 15 minutes! We want to you trial up.time, test it, put it through the paces in your environment. So far, up.time has over 700 customers in 32 countries because our trial let’s people see how up.time works in real-life, not on some fancy and wishful thinking demo.

We know that selecting a Systems Monitoring and Management Vendor can be time consuming. It’s also difficult to determine how to prioritize your needs. Therefore, we created a Systems Monitoring and Management Evaluation Checklist. This checklist is designed to help IT Managers and Administrators as they search for the right solution. Rather than starting from a blank sheet of paper, you can adapt the checklist to fit your needs, as it’s intended to be a generic list that can be updated, expanded and customized depending on your requirements. Edit and modify each of the items as you see fit. Also – if you are evaluating up.time (hint, hint), we’ve pre-populated a checklist with everything up.time has to offer. Click here to download a pdf copy or word document.

Interested in finding out more?  Check out our NEW Evaluation Center!

Alex

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Posted in Systems Management | 1 Comment »

Cloud Computing -The Clouds Are Brewing, Are You Ready for the Storm?

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

I recently watched some “unknown guy,” you know that “unknown techie” person Larry Ellison, rant about the cloud for at least 5 minutes. I found it interesting for a couple reasons:

1) He isn’t wrong that the cloud, in essence, is based on traditional hardware infrastructure placed essentially into the net, and that a lot of people are abusing the terminology for commercial means.

2) He has a huge interest in Netsuite, which is a SAAS based cloud CRM provider, and Oracle. Both organizations are doing a lot in the background around Cloud. Don’t believe me? Visit the Netsuite website or “http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/cloud/index.htm“.

Companies and luminaries in leadership positions will always say one thing in particular during periods of challenging competition or changing market landscapes. When you dig a bit deeper, these companies usually try to deny the newcomers as long as they can while hedging their bets in the background to protect their leadership position against the ever dangerous “game changer”.  This gives them time to position themselves as a prime player when the time comes.

Cloud computing is coming hard and fast. It’s a game changer.

Although the underlying technology components are the same, the ability to connect them over a public carrier network has increased its potential effect exponentially. The obvious truth is that the current catalyst for Cloud and the resurgence of centralized compute from a technology perspective, is the decrease in cost for network bandwidth. I recently downloaded an 8 Gigabyte file in less than an hour over a home-based broadband connection (21MBPS) . This is unbelievable when put in the context of connectivity not that long ago (ok, maybe I’m old)  – remember 28.8K Baud modems?

It’s no wonder that Cloud based services, like Microsoft Live Mesh, Sugar Synch, and Salesforce CRM, are able to provide ever richer and broader services “over the wire”.

Edge bandwidth to wireless devices right now is reaching upwards of 5 to 8 mbps in 3G HDSPA areas, making the new generation of netbooks, smartphones, and hybrid smartphone/notebook technologies, prime candidates to join the Cloud computingand social networking phenomenon. If Larry is ranting now, wait ’till billions of smartphones join the Cloud. I call dibs on the term “SWARM COMPUTING” for the surge of all these consumer grade devices to the Cloud. So, when Larry Ellison wants to rant about it, he can call my mobile.

In other words, the clouds are brewing,  make sure you grab an umbrella, there’s going to be a storm.

P.S. – If you haven’t seen  Larry’s tirade against “The Cloud” click here and enjoy the fireworks.

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Posted in Cloud Virtualization | 2 Comments »

Would you like some HYPE with your Management Tool Soup?

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

As a Solutions Architect, part of my job is to work with new prospects who are quite often bombarded by messaging from a wide variety of sources. By the time they get to me, usually ultra-niche players, or platform focused players have tried to convince them that what they need is a tool to solve their needs in a narrow or short sighted manner.

An example of a platform focused player are the tools the have a specific focus, say Windows for instance. Although tools like this appear to be broad, with a solid framework, they fall flat on their face when your organization brings in other platforms. This need will eventually arise in your organization at one point or another because of expansion, a need for new technologies to drive the business or even more importantly when your company has success and buys another company.  The contrast, of course, is a tool that can give you a single point of visibility into all hardware/software stack combos commonly found in the data center – including virtualization stacks.

The question to ask yourself is, what is the cost of going with a niche player? What will the time investment loss be when you are forced to adopt new technologies?

An example of an Ultra-Niche player would be the virtualization-only focused players in the market. Any vendor that focuses specifically and only on VMWare capabilities and visibility would be a great example. One such vendor focuses narrowly on consolidation and migration products. These products have such a narrow scope of focus, and can only be used as such a limited part of the IT systems life cycle.  They end up being thrown out after the consolidation and migration process is complete. More broad tools (like <here is my plug> up.time) in contrast, has the capability to aid you over the entire life cycle of your virtualization project AND most importantly ensure you have visibility over this infrastructure and the application and services that run on them – in the context of the whole data center.

The above two points often act as a point of illumination into the true capability of our product. It is very hard to find a product that incorporates the real useful features of those niche tools, that maintains a broad spectrum of platform support for heterogenous views, and lastly does all of that in an easy to roll out manner. It’s easy to see, that of the 300 to 400 vendors you can find on google that say they do systems and server monitoring, there are only a handful that can say they have the mandate and mission that uptime has set forth to accomplish.

“Ease of use” is a point that cannot be overstressed. In my role, we have displaced many products from much larger competitors, simply because our product focuses squarely on quick roll out and measurable results. We focus on ensuring that a minimum amount of administrative overhead is required to start collecting data that is immediately useful to your organization and then ensuring that that data can be used for a wide variety of uses. All the while the focus is to ensure that the client is able to do “what they need to do”, “when they need it”. Our clients realize that you need a tool that will guide you from simply monitoring infrastructure in a way that encourages adoption and pro-active action from “day 1″, while also allowing your organization to grow into sustainable capacity planning, virtualization planning, and SLA monitoring, reporting, and management.

It’s also very important that clients remember, that it’s the little things that matter. Many products emphasize alot of hype around their latest GUI features. Don’t get me wrong, uptime is no ugly duckling, we have one of the cleanest and most professional UI’s out there. What I am saying is, that clients quickly get caught up in needless or useless visualizations to impress people, not realizing that they are focusing on the features that really matter to the big picture. If your chosen system has a fantastic 3D rotating flaming logo, that’s amazing! I am sure it will likely impress alot of people initially and likely easily get you budget when you present it internally. But if the chosen system doesn’t have the features to laser guide notifications, escalate problems effectively and ensure that your staff don’t get unintelligible or spurious alerts at 3AM – you can bet that flaming logo visualization will be ignored soon and the product will be considered a bad investment down the line, putting you and your team at risk.  

By focusing on the ideas behind the examples above, one can see how quickly you can cut through the hype, avoid tool soup, and ensure that your organization ends up with a toolset that’s going to “get you there today” and “take you there tomorrow”.

I encourage you to join one of our public webinars to see for yourself how different and refreshing it can be to see a product demonstration that focuses on real client challenges…and no you won’t  be left at the end of the presentation asking  yourself if you should get some of that hype with your management tool soup.


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Posted in IT Management, IT operations, management, monitoring, Systems Management, uptime | 1 Comment »

Monitoring Applications and Business Services from an iPhone or Mobile Device

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

For the past couple of weeks I have been working with a large customer who needs immediate visibility into critical Business Services they are providing for multiple departments. The common complaint is that when people start saying “Application XYZ is down, or XYZ is really slow today” they don’t know where to start looking. This is actually a very common requirement for most of the prospects/customers I work with on a daily basis. This is why Application monitoring from a mobile device is extremely useful.

Luckily up.time 5 has a great solution that maps to this exact problem set. Application Status allows you to see the overall health of specific business services within your enterprise. From E-mail Infrastructure, Web Site Availability, Virtual Infrastructure Status and more you can rapidly see why a Business Service is having issues, drill down into deep forensics and improve MTTR within your organization.

You can access the Application Status real time dashboard from your PC, Blackberry® and iPhone® in both the standard or detailed view (Standard view shown below)

 

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Detailed reporting is also available showing the uptime/downtime for your specific applications/business services.

Application Availability Report

Application and Business Services Dashboards shown on the iPhone

 

This customer was actually able to try out this feature yesterday when users were complaining that they were not able to connect to their VMware vCenter via the Virtual Infrastructure Client. When they went to the applications view they immediately saw that the vCenter Database was offline. Going forward they have setup alerting and self healing profiles that would automatically notify the appropriate people as well as re-start the SQL service.

If you would like to check out the Application/Business Service Monitoring solution with up.time 5 please click on the link below:

Application Monitoring and Business Service Monitoring with up.time 5

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Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »