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Extend your Monitoring Capabilities with up.time’s Plugin Manager

Tuesday, May 29th, 2012

The uptime Solutions group has been hard at work enhancing the up.time experience. We recently released The Grid, which centralizes all of the up.time plug-in monitors we have available. In addition, we are now happy to announce, a brand new tool: The up.time Plugin Manager.

Quick value, this helps you see.

Yoda explains why this is important.

The ability to expand and extend the capabilities of a monitoring solution like up.time is essential in a world where new technologies are created every day. However, software that’s not quick and easy to deploy can often end up being a painful and long project for the sys-admins. If any software requires more than 15 minutes to get started, or if you have to open up a command prompt on Windows, it can be done better. In contrast, if the software allows me to create my own plugins and import them in the same way, then we have a winner. This is exactly what we’ve done for you.

So, how easy is the up.time Plug-in Manager to use? Once it’s installed, all plugins are installed via the standard up.time UI you’re already familiar with.

  • Just click ‘Browse,’
  • Select the plugin file,
  • Click ‘Upload’ (it will display information about the plugin monitor(s) info, file info, etc),
  • Click on ‘Install’.

That’s it, and in just a few  mouse clicks!

That’s not to say that everything out there will be this magical. A couple of  monitors still require an agent-side script that needs to be installed manually, but this is still very quick and easy to do.

We plan on continuing to enhance this cool new tool. If this sounds like something you want to use, here it is:

Download it for FREE >>

Additional Resources for the up.time Plugin Manager:

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Posted in IT Management, IT operations, management, monitoring, Server Monitoring, Systems Management, Uncategorized, uptime | No Comments »

The Do’s and Dont’s of Capacity Planning

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

When it comes to capacity planning, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the amount of raw data that you can potentially analyze in a data center environment. The question then becomes how you are going to take that data and make sense of it in a way that helps shape your decisions when it comes to adding or removing capacity.

When it comes to estimating capacity, you definitely want to get more depth then a simple metric like CPU utilization on a single server.

Here are some Do’s for capacity planning:

1) Ensure strong visibility across all  of your different platforms virtual, physical and cloud – Increasingly applications are being hosted across multiple infrastructure silos. Ensure that when you do your capacity planning, your toolset accounts for all the different platforms you are trying to monitor. The key here is, you want to as easily and rapidly as possible ensure that you can baseline and find trends across all of your infrastructure.
2) Get deeper visibility into the environment than just platform metrics - Platform metrics serve as a good first level of visibility into capacity, that is, obviously if a box is pegged at 100% CPU, this probably means it’s not doing very well from a capacity perspective. Conversely if the box is running only at 50% CPU or 50% memory, this doesn’t nessecarily gaurantee that the middleware or webserver applications running on that platform are not at full capacity or starving for some other kind of resources.  Ensure that you are also monitoring the application context sensitive capacity data. If your middleware is only capable of opening 500 database connections, you might want to know that you’re at 490, despite all other platform metrics being “OK”.
3) Schedule on-going reporting to your various capacity and performance teams – Capacity information is extremely useful, but shouldn’t be thought of as a “one off”. Capacity information should be made readily available to all teams, especially those doing physical consolidations, virtualization initiatives, or any team that is making any decisions on the acquisition of new hardware. Since decisions around these initiatives are being made all the time, scheduled reporting ensures that all stakeholders have the latest information available at all times. Not only that, these stakeholders will continue to be informed, even if you or parts of your team are on vacation.
4) Group your infrastructure in ways that reflect real business processes and application services – You want to be able to capacity plan against all kinds of permutations of servers, services and shared infrastructure stacks. Make sure that the groupings of servers you report on reflect real business services, applications and logical groupings (like application clusters). In this way, you should be able to rapidly report on aggregate capacity utilization and trends across these groupings without having to remake the wheel. Your tooling should enable you to report and access this data for subsets of infrastructure in a very low number of clicks, without doing SQL Queries, table joins or any advanced data warehousing.
5) Ensure visibility into time of day outages for capacity and relate them to SLAs – Sometimes the business linkage between availability, capacity and individual metrics streams can get really blurry in the “fog of war”. At the end of the day, you want to understand if capacity issues are driving outages and affecting SLA performance. You want to have the context over whether “time of day” performance is a driving force in this kind of capacity issue. For instance if 5000 VDI’s boot up in the morning and this saturates your connection broker, we might want to be able to correlate this time of day outage to the impact this is having on the end-user-experience for SLAs.

Here are important don’ts for capacity planning:

1) Ensure that you don’t have a virtual buffet of  different profiling/capacity tools – The last thing you want to do with capacity planning is try to do “screen level integration” of metrics or performance. That is, copying and pasting metrics from 10 different applications and trying to normalize them in a spreadsheet or data warehouse. This makes it impossible for you to aggregate the data quickly and cleanly. It calls into question the methedology, it wastes valuable time, and it produces results that are more likely than not going to be treated as unreliable by everyone involved.
2) Ensure that your capacity reporting isn’t merely a “static snapshot” in time – Often people use capacity planning reports that are static tables with a static count. For instance the number of virtual instances on Dec 10th. This kind of reporting doesn’t give you the type of insight required to understand the “capacity evolution” of the environment. You are much better off getting visibility into the number of virtual instances over time in a graph, or the virtual density over time so that you can see where things are headed and how workloads might be improperly stacked across the infrastructure stack.
3) Don’t hesitate to use your capacity planning initiative as a catalyst – In my experience, capacity planners have lots of data that would be very valuable to the operations/server teams that actually fix the servers.  Sometimes outages are related to a peak capacity issue. Traditionally reports and dashboards from capacity planning tools are much too cumbersome for members of the ops teams to use. If you have the right tools, the same data can be easily displayed and used by all. Having readily available capacity data correlated to outages is something that can be a catalyst for real wold discussions between 2 teams that sometimes find it hard to see “eye to eye”.
4) Don’t hide away your capacity data – Use dashboards and other reporting tools to make your capacity information available to everyone – your ops teams your management. This is essential data, and some teams may not be aware that they need it. How useful would it be for your ops and NOC teams to see an aggregate capacity dashboard up on a big screen? Wouldn’t it be great to see if there are obvious issues and spikes in capacity usage?
5) Don’t necessarily try to run before you can walk – Time and time again, I see people attempt to approach their capacity planning initiatives from a perspective of “pie in the sky”. That is, that they hope that they can guestimate workloads, be able to do theoretical “what if” analysis, and immediately be able to re-order their entire data center in one shot to maximize efficiency by 400%. The truth is, that very few products that promise to do the above are easy to rollout, do not require massive amounts of integration, and will not cost you an arm and a leg. All of this, without even taking into consideration that “what if” analysis is of little value to operations or server engineering teams. As a first step towards the road to the panacea of capacity planning data analysis, you need to consider the cost, the rollout time, and the overall impact of any tool you introduce to do capacity planning. Definitely make sure you are walking (getting visibility), jogging (making this visibility and awareness clear across the organization), and then running (hitting higher order capacity planning ideals with solid data). Most importantly make sure you are choosing a tool set that will help you get on that on-ramp as quickly as possible.

Capacity Planning with up.time VideoMy colleague Joel recently recorded a capacity planning video including tips and best practices while demonstrating up.time’s capacity planning capabilities. You can find it on our YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/uptimesoftware or on our website – click here to view video.

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What’s the Secret Sauce for Systems Management?

Monday, October 18th, 2010

So what’s the secret sauce to achieving a successful systems management deployment?

It all boils down to one word – adoption.

In fact this may be the dirty little secret that all the other vendors don’t want you to know. After all, anyone who sells software would try to say that a flaming logo, a long client list, a huge list of collected metrics, or a huge feature matrix is what people traditionally want to talk about.

Ask yourself, what good are ANY of the above, if the system isn’t focused on maximizing adoption from day 1 of your initiative, to day 300 of your initiative?

What amazes me time and time again, is that when I visit prospect sites, their number one complaint about their existing system is that nobody uses it, nobody trusts the alerts anymore, or that nobody trusts the underlying data because collection is unreliable.  So instead of being that unifying force, the catalyst for change or achieving the “single pane of glass” – the incumbent tool becomes a source of frustration and a wedge between different teams.

Think about it,  if nobody is using the tool, if nobody trusts the tool, or nobody feels that it’s worth the time or effort to try and figure the tool out and use it – all of your investment in the systems management initiative is lost.

And there’s a bunch of really great reasons why nobody is using or adopting those tools, for instance here are some of the questions I hear people rhetorically asked in client and prospect meetings all the time:

What good are systems that are hard to rollout and administer, thus alienating the deployment team?
What good are systems that generate seas of alerts for any given event, thus causing people to create email filters?
What good are systems that don’t ensure that alerts and actions are based on stringently verified trouble conditions, thus causing people to create even more email filters?
What good are systems that don’t allow you to tune those actions and messages to meet your corporate standards, thus resulting in confusing when alerts are actually delivered?
What good are systems that are hard to navigate through on an ad-hoc basis, or are hard to generate reports, thus resulting in users deciding it’s quicker to fire up a niche console tool? (How about to schedule them?)
What good is a system that doesn’t accomodate for your success? i.e you have to throw it out because a new business unit or technology group needs tools outside of your preferred stack, or you acquire other businesses that use a totally different technology stack? (long term adoption, scalability and suitability)
What good is a system that doesn’t provide value to everyone involved in delivering value in IT, from your helpdesk staff, to operations, to capacity, to individual technology silos?

The secret sauce is to drive adoption, and the way to make the secret sauce is to create a product that overcomes the challenges posed by the questions above, and to create an organization that speaks your language, understands your challenges and delivers not only the technology, but the dialogue and guidance that will ensure that your systems management roll-out acts as a catalyst for your success from day 1 to infinity.

Who says that your systems management solution can’t be “nutritious and delicious”?

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Fashion Fades, Style is Eternal

Monday, August 9th, 2010

Today, I invoke the immortal words of Yve Saint Laurent.

What does this fashion Icon have to do with systems management? As we all know, like fashion, IT fads come and go and quite often – what’s old is new again. Just think about the cycle for client-server computing over the last 25 years, we went from in fashion (this computing/mainframe), to out of fashion (client-server), to new again (IIAS/PAS/cloud computing).

The technology cycle like the fashion cycle is fraught with danger, just like a fashionista, we have to make sure we avoid becoming “just another fashion victim”, the owner of a technology “knockoff”, or even worse, end up with “mutton dressed as lamb”. We are constantly changing up the deck, in terms of what technologies de jour we are using to deliver our services.

The nice thing about having a good comprehensive systems management solution is that you really shouldn’t have to worry about what the latests fad is. Regardless of what technology is “in”, the flavor of the week should be easily monitored – especially by a product with an extensible plugin-framework, by a product that’s easy to use and configure, backed by an organization that’s forward looking and agile.

In the same way that people “in the know” can feel assured that Chanel, Prada, or Mark Jacobs are keeping abreast of the latest trends in fashion and ensuring that their product lines provide all the fundamentals for a current and complete wardrobe, you want a systems management toolkit that does the same in terms of supporting your data center initiatives, rationalizing your tool sets, and acting as a catalyst to align teams across silos.

For instance in today’s data center environment, some fundamental pieces you should have in your wardrobe today:

Think of a good systems management tool as a really good wallet – that must-have, timeless and fully functional, fashion accessory for the data-center that just keeps everything “together”.

So, there you have it, Fashion Fades, Style is Eternal. For more about my perspective on staying “minty fresh”, see my previous blog post here.

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The proof is in the pudding

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

For the first time in my up.time blogging career there will be no analogies – you are all “shocked and appalled” – I’m sure.

It’s time to cut right to the point, because sometimes actions speak louder than words.

Today, you will have the ability to see myself and Joel, “put our money where our mouth is” in our newly launched up.time evaluation center. The eval center is full of sub 3 minute videos that educate and illuminate on the “how-to’s” of fully experiencing an up.time trial.

If you have attended one of our webinars, you have heard us talk about ease of installation, roll-out, configuration and ease of use, now we want to show you that the real proof is in the pudding.

For instance in the first installment in the series, you can see me in full glorious YouTube HD performing an install of up.time on a server in less than 4 minutes! That particular video has a whole bunch of reasons in it for why you should get your evaluation mojo going. Also make sure you check out the “Next Steps” under each video, to make sure you get the most out of your time with our product.

So, what are you waiting for? Download the trial and get your evaluation on!

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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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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.

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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…

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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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Incident Priority Tracking with up.time 5.2

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

With all of the summer vacations happening it’s been a while since my last post but to get back in the swing of things I really wanted to talk about a feature from our newest release of up.time, version 5.2. The “Incident Priority Quadrant” report has gotten a lot of buzz from both existing customers, prospects and the press. Specifically I have one large financial customer who upgraded to up.time 5.2 and started running the “Incident Priority Quadrant” report on a weekly basis for their Tier 1 & 2 Applications. They are now easily able to see where they need to concentrate their very “limited” resources. As well they have been looking at the areas where they can setup some automation. This brings me to another topic – VMware’s new “vCenter Orchestrator™”. up.time 5.2 has direct integration with this drag and drop Automation and Orchestration tool… but I will save all that for my next post.

Incident Priority Quadrant Report

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