The up.time IT Systems Management Blog

Posts Tagged ‘IT Systems Management’

Joy is up.time

Monday, June 7th, 2010

This morning I’ve decided to rip BMW’s new tag line “Joy is BMW”. As any of you who follow my blog posts, you know I eat tag lines for breakfast.

So what’s the question Alex? Yes, my old antics – what could this possibly have to do with systems management?

It’s amazing how the typical car history of any fire breathing male on the planet matches the buying patterns for systems management tools. Ok trust me, I haven’t graduated to hardcore drug use, this actually makes a lot of sense if you follow me.

In the case of the car buying,  just like purchasing a systems management tool, you are making a huge investment and hoping that your purchase meets your needs. If the purchase results in a solution that  isn’t reliable or isn’t practical for your needs, you are potentially putting yourself in a “hard place” because you won’t have budget to get yourself into another “vehicle” for a while.

Let’s use my personal car history (don’t judge me, I like fast 2 door cars) and analyze what each car would represent in terms of the systems management world.

Vehicle Representative Monitoring Solution
Ford Probe GT
“fully customized fast and furious style - custom giant turbocharger”
Probe GT Freeware tools
Hyundai Tiburon GT
“Bone stock – reliable – not very fast”
Tiburon Niche Tools
BMW 335i Coupe
“Break Neck Fast, Well Built, Beautiful aesthetics,practical,  just works”
335i up.time
Audi R8
“Fast on a track, Well Built, Super Expensive, Impractical”
(** no I don’t own this car yet, this is for illustrative purposes)
  Big 4/Legacy Vendors

So just how does the maturity process in buying cars map to the maturity process in buying systems management tools?

Take my first car. I had a lot of time on my hands at that point in my life. First job, on top of the world, no responsibilities, I was content to take my stock Ford Probe GT  and customize it like there was no tomorrow. I had to totally rewire the engine, add a turbocharger and make it the envy of wannabe racers world wide. You could find me customizing something, painting something, tuning something on any given weekend. The real problem – reliability of the vehicle suffered, and I started to run out of time maintining the mods, and slowly the shiny afterglow of having a totally “customized” solution wore off.  This is exactly what happens when you use freeware tools as your monitoring tool, inevitably the tooling just can’t keep up as your needs grow, you end up scripting or modding conf files till you are pulling your hair out. Suddenly you’re yearning for a more mature solution.

So in my quest for the perfect car, I turned to my next car purchase. The Hyundai Tiburon. I vowed never to be modding or doing huge maintenance, this next car would have boy racer DNA. Well unfortunately I got tricked by the marketing, the Tiburon was a “fast looking” car. To it’s credit it was very reliable, and got the job done in terms of looking the part. But ultimately it didn’t meet my needs, which was the desire to have a VERY FAST vehicle, that was a joy to drive, was reliable, wasn’t flashy and didn’t require modifications of any kind. Live and learn. In this way, some people graduate from freeware to niche tools that only meet some of their needs, yes they are careful to avoid the maintenance headaches, but maybe they end up with a platform that can ONLY monitor Microsoft solutions for instance. Eventually you’ll realize you got half way there but your needs aren’t being met. You need the right systems and server monitoring tool that can grow with your needs.

They say 3 times is a charm, and when it comes to my car history, I can happily say this cliche is totally right. The 335i is the perfect balance of practicality, reliability, and breakneck speed. The 2 turbochargers under the hood growl when I want them to, or the car runs deceptively quiet if I’m going through your grandmas neighbourhood. It’s got plenty of trunk space, and it doesn’t cry out “I want attention” (like cars made by Audi these days IMHO). So not only is the vehicle a joy to drive, everything fits my needs, it just feels right every time I get into the drivers seat. This is exactly what it feels like when you install up.time. If you don’t believe me give it a try.

So what’s the future for this boy racer? Have I found my dream car? Yes, for now. But, you can bet, as with those big 4 frameworks, that if I were to buy an Audi R8, I’d be dropping a wad of cash for a car that just isn’t practical for everyday use. Sure it would be great to have everything the R8 has to offer today, but it’s more than my needs (I’m not having my mid life crisis yet for instance). Frankly, it would require me to have multiple vehicles and I would end up keeping my 335i as my daily driver. Sound familiar? Why have a best of breed/fragmented/patchwork of solutions when we all want to rationalize our garage/toolsets?

Don’t make the mistake of buying the R8 before you are ready to have a 4 car garage, get up.time and find out what real joy in systems management and monitoring is all all about.

Continuing to Innovate – New up.time Release

Monday, May 17th, 2010

It’s been a busy day for us at uptime software today, as our new release of up.time hit the marketplace this morning. We’ve had fantastic feedback from both analysts and media alike, especially surrounding our ability to address the needs to Mid-Enterprise IT departments.

We are finding that Mid-Enterprises are facing a very complex IT environment that includes applications and infrastructure spanning virtual, physical and cloud platforms. While there are expensive solutions available to large enterprises, there is little on the market for these mid-sized enterprises, which face the very same challenges. The key, we have found, is that they need:

  • Deep Monitoring: Providing metrics at the service, application and systems resource levels
  • Simple Management: Virtual, physical, and cloud environments with a single tool
  • Ensured Service Levels: Proactive issue avoidance and automated healing
  • Affordability and Ease-of-use: Most importantly, they need to do this with a tool that is quick to deploy, easy to use, and affordable based on their budgets.

I thought I would share a couple of the articles that have already been published on up.time today:

Information Week: uptime software Refreshes Monitoring Tool for Mid-Market

CTO Edge: uptime software Makes IT Simpler

What makes this exciting is the perfect fit that mid-enterprise companies have found when using up.time. In fact, more than 90 percent of our new customers in 2009 were mid-enterprise. So, we know first hand what these companies need to be successful. They need a powerful systems management solution that is truly low maintenance, able to deploy quickly and affordable at a mid-enterprise price. up.time is the perfect fit for mid-size companies that want deep monitoring of virtual and physical environments with a single tool but have constrained IT staff and budgets.

More to come…

Alex

P.S. and next blog, I’ll take my marketing hat off…

Find Your Inner Fighter Pilot

Monday, April 12th, 2010

In systems management, we can learn alot from the mentality of a fighter pilot. What – you say, Ken’s been smoking the good stuff over the sunny Toronto weekend? What could a fighter pilot possibly have in common with someone in IT systems management?

A lot more than you think.

Think about it, what is a datacenter? A highly tuned combination of hardware and software designed to deliver services to the business. What is a Jet Fighter? A complex combination of millions of hardware components with a highly tuned set of software components designed to defend the pilot and provide the services nessecary for him to project his will at command. Wow, not so different?

So where have we gone wrong? What can we learn from the Jet Fighter Pilot? The difference is in approach. Just like the pilot and his cockpit we have huge arrays of data available to us through gauges, niche software, profiling tools, scripts… you name it we have it.  Guess what? When the pilot is in the heat of an engagement, he’s assessing his threats, he’s not sitting there fixating on a particular gauge. We need to stop fixating on niche tools, profilers and other specific metrics, we need something similar to a Pilot’s heads up display that will us to assess the biggest threats to the IT organization.

Worse, you’ve bought a tool that claims to do this, but rather than having a nice seamless HUD display or ”single pane of glass“, you have a “stainglass window” comprised of dozens of individual applications poorly duct-taped together.

Good thing uptime has a very specialized set of reporting capabilities to allow you to figure out where your major IT problem hotspots are, which infrastructure is suffering  infrequent downtimes, and where constant “5 minute problems” are sapping your team’s productivity.

All of the above issues ARE the major threat to IT, those are the things that make people wonder “Why aren’t we outsourcing this service? it NEVER works!”, this is the equivalent of having your jet fighter shot down.

Join me on one of our upcoming webinar series and find out how to unleash your inner fighter pilot.

Devotion to Duty

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

Today’s xkcd comic was one that I got a real kick out of.  Picture John McLane as a sysadmin, and you get the picture.  The unstoppable reluctant hero, the right guy in the right place at the wrong time.  The relentless pursuit of availability and performance for the apps they support no matter the effort, that common thread amongst all great sysadmins worth their salt.  But at what cost to the admin and those around them does this come?  Well if they have subpar systems management software, at great cost.  A good toolkit of monitoring/management software and a few point tools for some vendor specific use cases will allow our protagonist to go from being the burnt out, run down admin to becoming the Dicky Fox of IT and jump each morning head first into whatever the world (or the Datacenter) can throw at them.  Systems Management software is to the sysadmin what spinach is to Popeye.  It’s going to give them what they need when the going gets tough.  With detailed drill down data and analytics traversing from Physical to Virtual environments and back becomes something that is done with ease. 

I’m a big fan of tools, my workshop has far more than my wife thinks any sane person should require.  There is a saying, “The right tool for the job”.  You wouldn’t try and screw in a Philips head screw with a Robertson driver (The Robertson, BTW is the possibly best screw head ever.  And a nice little Canadian invention.  Licensing issues kept the world from reaping the benefits of this beauty).  When picking the right tool for the job, you are balancing a few things.  Cost and capabilities being key.  You can buy a $30 screwdriver that only screws in one type of screw, or you can buy a set of screwdrivers for $30 and do all sorts of different screwing.  I’ll tell you though that the $30 single driver will probably never strip and will be able to drive screws until you lose it.  On the other hand, the $10 driver will probably do the trick as well, and provide you with a quality driver.  Where am I going with this?  The systems management space has all kinds of offerings that you can put into your toolbox.  There are expensive tools that do one thing and do it flawlessly.  There are cheap tools that can do a mountain of things, but they don’t excel at any one thing and you’ll end up outgrowing them as you become more proficient with your tools.  Then there are the sweet spot tools, the Rigid’s of the software world.  These tools that do exactly what you require, they do it well and you would be hard pressed to outgrow them.  This is where I feel that up.time fits into the systems management software space.  We’re not the cheap tool, but we’re not the overly expensive Tivoli or HPOV framework either.  We fit into that sweet spot where you are going to get pretty well everything you could ask for and be happy with what it cost you.

So do your sysadmins a favour and thank them by letting them trial up.time.  It will make their life easier and make the you, the IT manager, look like a hero as well with increased productivity and cost-savings. Even if you don’t go with a solution from us, when your sysadmins ask for tools, open your IT wallets for them at least a little.  Some IT spinach will go a long way to keeping the strength in the arms of your Datacenter Popeyes!

Why Real Winners Keep IT in Focus – A Lesson from Google.

Friday, February 12th, 2010

Ok. You’ve got me – I’m a Google fan. I believe in Google, I think they are better than sliced bread. I even imported a grey Market Google phone the day they released it and switched my carrier to make it happen. Wow, this fanboy is declaring his love for Google on his corporate blog post. End of story right?

Unfortunately not, over the past few weeks Google has gone on a flury of announcements, product launches, and new corporate adventures.  Let’s do a review:

1) Launching the Google Phone and attacking the consumer phone market with a new (for North America) direct sales model

2) Launching Google Buzz and attacking the social media market

3) Launching the new 1 Gigabit broadband internet project

So what’s my beef? I strongly believe that companies you can depend on and come to rely on in your daily operations and life need to keep their core focus. That is, good companies continue to concentrate on doing what they are good at. Losing your core focus to attack 3 of the most tumultuous markets – the Consumer Handset Market, the Social Media Sphere, and the Telecom Industry – seems like excessive risk. Why didn’t Google decide to focus on developing into these monsterous, barb ridden markets one at a time? Is their ambition bigger than their capability? Or are they naive with their newfound power and have already decided that they can take on any market?

So what’s the lesson? How does this relate to systems management?

Partnering with a solutions vendor for IT systems management that doesn’t have a core focus on the market is a mistake that I’ve seen played out time and time again. Practitioners get sucked into platforms designed by vendors who either have a vested interest in their own software stack, have a focus on markets that have nothing to do with the end user (MSP for instance), or are busy building functionality and features that just aren’t really related to managing the infrastructure but are more focused on vanity metrics.

A lack of focus also results in a fragmentation of the solution, as we see in many of the big 4 frameworks. Fragmentation is the careless tacking together and bolting together of 3rd party systems or intellectual property from acquisitions. This makes for very nice marketecture diagrams and collateral - but produces solutions that have clients scratching their heads 12 to 24 months after roll-out thinking “where did all my money go”?

Maybe Google is capable of attacking 3 massive markets at once and is capable of diverting their focus on multiple fronts, but IT systems management and monitoring vendors cannot.

When choosing a vendor, make sure you partner with a young agile company, that lives, breathes and does nothing but create a management solution that works. End of story.

Thanks Google, and good luck.

Service overload, it’s happening again, this time with real consequences

Friday, January 15th, 2010

A while back I wrote a blog post on how an event in our popular culture, in this case it was the death of pop icon Michael Jackson, can cause unpredictable and unprecedented increases in traffic to online services.  In the case of Michael Jackson, TMZ and other sites were unable to handle the traffic of their readership trying to find out what had happened.  Well here in Canada, and I’m sure in other countries, the outpouring of support for those who have been hit in Haiti by the magnitude 7 earthquake is bringing the webservers of aid organizations to their knees.  With the surge in donations on their systems, the servers are periodically crashing.  Fortunately they are back online, but still unable to fully handle the workload imposed by those trying to give.  As this article points out, please keep trying to donate, as every dollar is needed in this dire time.

In Canada, our government is matching every dollar contributed by Canadians to the relief effort.  Perhaps some of the cloud providers out there could donate their infrastructure and technical expertise to shoulder the donation collection burden from these organizations.

2009: A Year in Review; and looking forward to 2010

Monday, January 11th, 2010

I thought I’d take a little time to review this past year, which has been a crazy year, and then briefly comment on the upcoming year.

In light of one of the most depressing economic years in a good long while, we’ve fared very well, acquiring several hundred new customers this year and retaining and growing our existing account base.  We have a fantastic customer renewal rate, and can you believe that 87% of up.time customers buy more within a year!  We launched a great new release of up.time (5.2) this past summer which has capabilities to help automate virtualized environments to minimize or eliminate incidents (or reduce MTTR), can scale to over 15,000 systems deployed globally, and is more tightly integrated with virtualization technologies to help oversee systems in the physical, virtual, and now ‘cloud’ based worlds.  Our VMware appliance (listed on the VAM) has seen its download rate skyrocket the past few months and is almost becoming our primary evaluation platform by prospects.

We’ve also been covered extensively by the industry press and analysts, and for good measure I’ve included a brief list below.  One exciting award includes winning (again) the TechWorld 2009 Product of the Year Award. See more of our awards and reviews here.

In keeping at the forefront of social media, we’re on Twitter as @uptimesoftware, so you can follow us for updates and successes.  There are also a number of staff Twittering about a variety of diverse topics, so @uptimesoftware to ask who they are to follow them.

We have some exciting new releases of the software coming out this year, all furthering our virtualization and virtual server monitoring, as well as cloud capabilities, more as we get closer to release times.

Staying strong, loving it, looking forward to 2010.  Cloud will definitely be first and foremost on people’s mind, but we’ll still be doing what we do best, and that is help you monitor, measure, and manage your systems.

Thanks from everybody on the uptime team.

Alex

o CIO Magazine: How Mt. Sinai’s IT Team Made Virtualization Easier – Kevin Fogarty, CIO Magazine, June 2009.

o Network World: Better Efficiency in VMware Environments – June, 2009

o InformationWeek: up.time Monitors VMWare Physical, Virtual Assets – Charles Babcock, InformationWeek, July2009.

o eWeek: up.time offers Deep VMware Monitoring and Management – July, 2009

o Virtual Strategy Magazine Podcast – June, 2009

o Award: TechWorld Product of the Year – November 2009

o Award: Braham Software 300 – March 2009

o Award: Software 500 – September 2009

o March 2009 – 451 Group Insight Report (No downtime for uptime as it retools its software for virtual, distributed IT)

o June 2009 – 451 Group Insight Report (uptime Software gets deeper into VMware with latest release)

o June 2009 – The Virtualization Practice (uptime software Delivers Next-Generation VMware Monitoring and Reporting)

o July 2009 – Gartner ECA Magic Quadrant

o August 2009 -  451 Group Focus Report (uptime as target for EMC)

o August 2009 – IDC Worldwide Performance and Availability Software Vendor Report (included as a ‘Vendor to Watch’)

o September 2009 – Forrester Webinar with JP Garbani (Doing More with Less: Today’s Success Essentials for Better IT Systems Management

o September 2009 – Forrester Webinar with Galen Schrek (“Virtual Dexterity:” The Keys to Successfully Leveraging Virtual Environments)


The Hitchhikers Guide to Cloud

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

I have just started using a service called Evernote to try and allow me to keep my notes and thoughts organized across all moments of inspiration, brainstorming and discussions with others whenever or wherever they occur.  So far it looks to be a promising solution.  Evernote is essentially providing me with cloud based storage with their particular access paradigm on top of it.  They have clients for all manner of OS and device as well as a web client.  I can access my Evernotes pervasively, wherever I am, and from whatever technology mechanism I have at hand.  This is one of the promises of the cloud and they fulfill this promise.

This however, is not the ultimate promise of the cloud.  Ultimately I would like to be able to access my Evernotes and any other data or data management/manipulation services from the cloud as a single federated source of information and information processors/transformers.  Aside from the fact that there are no standard cloud information sharing protocols or data manipulation standards being used by all service providers, one of the key problems is the issue of federation and trust.  We’ve got passport, openID, and other technologies for a federated identity management solution, but the adoption of these technologies seems to be absent in many of today’s cloud offerings.  I use a few different cloud services now, and I have a different userid for all of them.  Even if they provided a means for me to link their services with one another, I would still have to manage a different identity across services.

This same federated/aggregated service mashup challenge exists in the systems and server monitoring space.  With services moving to the cloud, multiple datacenters and 3rd party IT interfaces, you need a management and monitoring tool that can manage these components locally, but still be able to aggregate them into a global view with the flexibility to mash them together into higher order views that take the local information and, through a little magic, allow you to create global knowledge. 

For Example, in up.time we have had our local monitoring instance – or what we call and LDC instance - and our global console – or EMS -  deployed in a large distributed enterprise to allow customers to extend basic monitoring from  a local monitoring tool into an enterprise service delivery knowledge platform. This provides you with critical information on your infrastructure, as well as knowledge about how those services are delivered across your business, with the explicit understanding of the business impact of those services.  When we have silos of valuable information, combining them together turns that information into actionable knowledge.

The cloud is allowing us to create highly accessible and pervasive silos of very valuable information.  However, no matter how much information you have, it’s only valuable when we can convert that information into knowledge.  The potential for the cloud as a future knowledge platform, with the appropriate federation between services and between users of those services, is a great opportunity enabled by technology of the 21st century.  It has the potential to fundamentally change how we do things. 

When speaking of knowledge, “Tacitness generally describes the extent to which knowledge is not codifiable (Galunic and Rodan, 1998). Tacit knowledge is personal, context specific, and therefore hard to formalize and communicate whereas explicit or codifable knowledge is transmittable in formal and systematic language (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). Furthermore, intangibles like specific knowledge is expensive to transfer across because it cannot be easily aggregated meaningfully (Hayek, 1945).” – (Theory of the firm, Bach Seung, Bai – 2004)”

We are filling the cloud with an unimaginable amount of tacit knowledge about anything and everything imaginable at an astronomical rate.  Combined with the AI technologies already available to mine, link and understand this data, we will be able to take these islands of knowledge from across the cloud and leverage it into a global knowledge platform with a tacit knowledge breadth that covers virtually everything.  We will be able to access this ‘Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy‘ from anywhere at any time, and it will always be up to date, with literally hundreds of millions of people updating this knowledge base in real time.

(I realize there are several major challenges to the earthly H2G2 related to the information processing, but look at where we are today already, and in a very short period of time, it’s not an ‘if’ but a ‘when’)

2010 The year of cloud enabled convergence

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

This is my thesis for today’s post: Geek toys are important for the future of digital convergence.

2010 will be a year where we will obviously see unprecedented leaps in the availability of geek toys. As you are all aware, CES is happening and a few well timed launches are expected.  The general themes are extremely clear, thanks to a few “leaks” to the press this year.  Consumers are expecting a huge explosion of  devices in ‘tablet form’ as well as a dollop of mobile computing devices based on the Android mobile application ecosystem.  In essence we are all expecting 2010 to be full of ultra powerful, low power, beautifully designed tablet ‘like’ devices that look like they came off the latest set of a Star Trek episode. All of these juicy play things will be delivering waves of toy induced Geek euphoria among the masses for months to come. Will I be partaking in this geek fest? Absolutely, I’ll be one of the early adopters rocking a Nexus One, but that’s not really the point of my post.

From a consumer standpoint, the entire internet and our entire digital lives are converging into devices like the Nexus One and the Apple tablet. That’s amazing when you consider that these devices are essentially a “piece of glass” with a wireless interface, a processor, some kind of solid state memory and a camera. This has been enabled by huge leaps in battery technology, low power computing, but more importantly the richness the “cloud” or essentially what the internet has to offer us on these new types of devices.

The contrast is that, from an IT systems management perspective, the stack used to deliver business services, and ultimately, the content and services to these endpoints gets exponentially more complex and layered with every iteration in the design of the devices. The iterations are also getting faster, as the race to conquer this wild west arena heats among all the usual suspects.

So, this is going to be great for consumers. We are going to see an explosion of different operating system variants, hardware paradigms, and new ways of consuming media. The question becomes, how many IT decision makers are already wondering, what will the impact of people wanting to rock an “ISlate” at work be? What will be the impact of having to provide more and more business services over the wire to mobile platforms like Android, Apple’s mobile tablet OS, Chrome on the Google Tablet (and the list will go on and on for 2010) be? What will be the business impact of having to monitor all the new infrastructure or SAAS based services needed to manage these devices from a corporate policy perspective? How about even the basics of trying to monitor the explosion of different kinds of endpoints themselves as they penetrate the enterprise? We all remember that the IPhone was initially a consumer only device, that later penetrated the enterprise with impunity. Most of my posts end with the same question – are you ready?

2010 – The Year of Cloud Experimentation – Part 1 of 2

Monday, November 30th, 2009

At uptime software, we’ve been quite bullish on Cloud’s potential but feel it still has some distance to cover before it lives up to the hype. In fact, I wrote a blog in January looking at a hypothetical company and the costs involved in moving an entire infrastructure into the Cloud (using Amazon EC2). The results were not impressive, Cloud computing was too expensive (in this example) to gain the critical mass it needs to catch on. It’s amazing how much had changed in the ten months since that blog, as we have learned more about how the Cloud can be best utilized. Recently, the media has driven the Cloud excitement and IT managers are now thinking about how the Cloud, in one form or another, can be used in their environments to drive performance and efficiencies.

The real question is this; in what capacity will organizations adopt Cloud over the next few years? With that in mind, we see the coming year as one of exploration and experimentation. The first step is for companies to quantify what Cloud means to their business.  Is it as banal as remote storage used for DR purposes, or something as evolved as dynamic compute with secure private/public networking?

Let’s take a look at the “IT Spectrum,” which is loosely aligned with IT maturity and size of organization.

In this diagram, the left represents most small businesses who house their own servers and have a small number of IT staff.  As the small business matures, they may evaluate SaaS-type applications (like Salesforce.com) or push some servers out to an MSP.  Further maturing, or growing, businesses may have additional servers in remote hosted datacenters, like web servers or remote disaster recovery storage.  At the right-most point in the spectrum, businesses/enterprises have opted to completely outsource their IT and minimize the number of IT staff employed by the business.

Understanding the spectrum’s components is important. They represent a “menu” of options that businesses can use to leverage virtualization and cloud technologies to reduce costs (either labor or infrastructure).  This “menu” is most likely how IT managers will choose to evaluate the relevance of Cloud to cost savings and enhanced service delivery.  For example, with VMware’s new VBlock offering and the ongoing relationship with Terremark, entire stacks of infrastructure can be pushed into off-premises locations and operated in a mission-critical environment. So, whether it’s just dipping a toe into the Cloud waters (like hosting a server in Amazon EC2 or the RackSpace Cloud to deliver a decoupled application) or leveraging the VBlock to move entire mission critical infrastructures, there are many options to consider. Keep in mind that issues such as backup management, lifecycle management, and systems management need to be addressed in all cases.

How is the experimentation starting?

[ more next week in Part 2 ]