The up.time IT Systems Management Blog

Posts Tagged ‘up.time’

Why Freeware Just Doesn’t Cut it for the Mid-Enterprise

Monday, September 13th, 2010

Time for ‘the Ugly Truth’. Freeware just isn’t good enough sometimes.

Here’s 5 of the main characteristics of Freeware tools that make them unsuitable for the mid-enterprise:

  1. Hard to configure out of the box - You want a solution that is intuitive, with a clean interface, that doesn’t require massive amounts of scripting or customization to get started. You definitely wouldn’t want a solution that describes itself as “tricky to configure out of the box – even when you’ve got a good grasp of what’s going on”. Every interface in a good solution should guide you towards the best practices that will save you time and get your project rolling as quickly as possible.
  2. Extremely cumbersome to maintain and operate – You want a solution that’s well thought out, that doesn’t use conf files to keep lists of devices or massive lists of alerts. You want a system that uses rules, that minimizes the number of full time staff hours to operate, and most of all is easy to learn so that all of your staff can have the ability to work with the monitoring solution.
  3. Requires massive customization to achieve results – You want a solution that allows you to monitor your infrastructure right out of the box, with a wide variety of available monitoring capabilities for various heterogenous platforms, and that has the ability to monitor all of your common infrastructure stack elements. You definitely don’t want to learn a whole bunch of scripting to do something basic like webservice, ftp, or database monitoring.
  4. No commercial support – You don’t want to be sifting through knowledgebases, mailing lists, and forums every time you find something that doesn’t seem to make sense when you use a product. You want to be able to pick up the phone, email someone and have experts on the product guide you to a suitable resolution. You need to have this because monitoring is an essential service, the last thing you need is to “wait for someone else who might have had this problem” to reply to your post on a public forum. You definitely don’t want the whole development and support organization to be “one guy”, who “can’t respond to emails directly”. That’s just a supportability nightmare for your selected solution.
  5. No scaleable architecture – As you continue to grow, all the problems above amplify themselves, but more importantly your infrastructure will grow across disparate geographic locations, and freeware tools just don’t have the kind of distributed archticture as per up.time’s Multi Data Center (MDC) functionality to cope with the needs of multi-site reporting and collection. You need to be able to scale across multiple sites, intelligently and efficiently and manage everything from a single unified console.

The result of the above 5 points is that organizations typically experiment with Freeware tools initially, until they realize that the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) due to man hours and massive maintenance required to keep their systems going just doesn’t make any sense. This is when the “aha moment” happens and people decide it’s time to graduate to a more robust tool.

Heck, don’t just take it from me, read this stuff directly from the “getting started guide for beginners” from one of the websites of a freeware tool (emphasis added by me). You’ll instantly see all the warning signs that this may not be what you wanted to sign up for.

“Here are some important things to keep in mind for first-time Nag*** users:

  1. Relax – it’s going to take some time. Don’t expect to be able to get things working exactly the way you want them right off the bat. it’s not that easy.
  2. Use the quickstart instructions. The quickstart installation guide is designed to get most new users up and running with a basic Nag*** setup fairly quickly. Within 20 minutes you can have Nag*** installed and monitoring your local system. Once that’s complete, you can move on to learning how to configure Nag*** to do more.
  3. Read the documentation. Nag*** can be tricky to configure when you’ve got a good grasp of what’s going on, and nearly impossible if you don’t. Make sure you read the documentation (particularly the sections on “Configuring Nag***” and “The Basics”). Save the advanced topics for when you’ve got a good understanding of the basics.
  4. Seek the help of others. If you’ve read the documentation, reviewed the sample config files, and are still having problems, send an email message describing your problems to the nag***-users mailing list. Due to the amount of work that I have to do for this project, I am unable to answer most of the questions that get sent directly to me, so your best source of help is going to be the mailing list. If you’ve done some background reading and you provide a good problem description, odds are that someone will give you some pointers on getting things working properly. “

So you could download a freeware tool and “Relax” because it’s going to “take some time”, or you can download up.time and relax because it’s going to be easier than you thought. The choice is yours.

Don’t worry it’s not like “choose” your own adventure, in the end, whichever way you decide, in the end, up.time always will be the right choice.

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Posted in IT Management, Systems Management | 2 Comments »

NetFlow: Network analytics at your fingertips

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

In my last post I mentioned I would talk about a few topics on a more technical level so today I’ll be talking about our NetFlow integration with a product named Scrutinizer from Plixer. I’ve also created a video introducing the NetFlow integration here.

Would you like the ability to zoom out to the 40,000 foot level and look at how your SLA’s are performing, yet drill down to have a look at who are your worst offending users and applications on your network? How about we take it one step further and have a look at who’s using up the most amount of bandwidth on an individual port on your core switch? Would you believe me if I said you can get all that power and visibility from one tool in the palm of your hand (if you have a mobile with a decent web browser)? Alright, that’s enough from the sales part of me. Yes, you do get all of the above with up.time.

It’s easy to access the NetFlow section from within up.time. By clicking on a server that is on the same network as a NetFlow monitored switch you will see a link in the Graphing section for NetFlow metrics. This gives you direct visibility into the network usage of the server and the top networking applications; and that’s just the default NetFlow view. From there you can slice-and-dice all of the network metrics and flows and find out the top applications, highest bandwidth usage, communication flows, and many other detailed network metrics coming from the server. It provides you with almost infinite drill-down capabilities into detailed low-level network metrics for your network administrators.

The GlobalScan dashboard gives you visibility into your global infrastructure availability, and now we also provide detailed visibility into your network usage and availability as well. You get detailed network analytics without having to drill down into a complicated profiler tool, all from within the up.time interface.

For example: it will show you which server is using up the most amount of bandwidth; and if it was a rogue system serving torrents and saturating your network pipeline up.time would bring that to the surface and show you immediately without requiring hundreds of clicks to get at that data.

With NetFlow Analytics you get higher visibility into what is happening on your network without having to sit there watching the packets fly by and this helps your network team proactively trace patterns before outages can occur. For a look at how this all looks and works feel free to check out our video on NetFlow – click here to check it out.

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Posted in NetFlow Monitoring, Systems Management | 2 Comments »

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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Posted in Systems Management | 1 Comment »

Hello World.

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

Being one of the new kids on the blog I should introduce myself a little, so let’s get this out of the way. My name’s Joel and I’m one of the Solution Architects here at uptime. I like fast cars and geeky toys, and since my latest toy for this summer is a Honda CBR600, I’m sure I’ll manage to incorporate that into some of my posts as well. I also have a thing for Audi vehicles, which apparently seem to be discussed quite frequently by some other german-car-drivers around here. That’s alright though, because we always enjoy a little friendly competition.

My focus will be to blog on detailed technical features in up.time and how they can be valuable for you. I’ve recently began with a couple of videos highlighting some new features of up.time, NetFlow and Agentless Windows Monitoring (click here to find them on the videos page), and more will be on the way. I hope I can bring some value for you and show how up.time is really meant to be used.

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up.time PodCast on DABCC

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

Great new PodCast on DABCC!

up.time Software: Virtualization Management Podcast with Alex Bewley and Nick Johnson – June 21, 2010 – Episode 127
In Episode 127, Douglas Brown interviews Alex Bewley, Chief Technology Officer and Nick Johnson, Director of Marketing at up.time software. In this podcast Doug, Nick, and Alex will discuss the up.time solution for virtualization and physical systems management, how it works, what it takes to install, what’s new in the latest version, how and why a customer would benefit from it, why we should care, and much more.

Alex

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Netflow | Network Data You Can Actually Use

Monday, June 21st, 2010

In the latest release of up.time there are a whole bunch of goodies, but I’m going to take a moment to talk about one specific feature that you should all be aware about, our Netflow capabilities.

To understand Netflow, let’s first start with how we (as in anyone who cares about the network) would do diagnostics and troubleshooting any kind of network error in the past. Trust me, I used to do this as a junior network engineer to pay my way through school, and I know all too well the pain of what I describe below.

First, you would go to your console tools, run those, and examine point stats. Because the point stats are “just the state of the network at the point in time”, and because the consoles are so hard to navigate by text, trying to find out trouble areas or diagnose distributed outages would be like finding a “needle in a haystack”.

Second, ok we’ve figured out that the point in time stats are a pain, if we’ve figured anything out, maybe we would now switch to something with some historical stats like MRTG or Cricket. The bad thing about these tools, they display static graphs over fixed time periods, trying to do any ad-hoc analysis is impossible. Even worse, these tools sort of illuminate key metrics like throughput, capacity utilization, dropped frames, but once you get to that level of figuring out which connections are being flogged, what do you do next? You have zero visibility into the traffic, the applications or any context over why that port or set of ports is underperforming or saturated.

Third, we bring out the BFG (Big !@#$%^& GUN). The passive network profiling tool. You configure the spanning port on the switch or router, you hook up a big honking expensive passive network profiler and what do you do? You WAIT. You wait for this network data to get collected, then you spend hours pouring over the ultra granular network profiling data in hopes of figuring out what is happing on your network.

Does the above sound like sanity or insanity? By the time you deploy the BFG, maybe your users are done watching the world cup viral videos, or maybe the DDOS attack is over.

Let me tell you what you need instead:

You need to be able to alerted on general network outages and performance issues in as they occur
You need to be able to drill down into network traffic breakdowns on network devices AND servers
You need to be able to pro-actively have a network dashboard that focuses less on profiling type operations, and more on network threats, misconfigurations and common applications that cause trouble on the network
You need to be able to perform ad-hoc analysis at will, on demand to rapidly gain insight into what’s going on.

This is what up.time’s netflow capabilities provide. If you want to see more, join one of our what’s new webinars and I’ll be happy to take you on a tour. Click here to register.

Here’s some eye candy to whet your appetite:

up.time NetFlow Monitoring up.time NetFlow Dashboard

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Posted in Systems Management, uptime | 1 Comment »

Interview with Randy Bias, CEO of cloudscaling

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

A few weeks ago I was able to catch up with Randy Bias, CEO of cloudscaling, in Seoul, Korea where he is currently camped out for a large engagement his firm is working on.  It was really early our time, and really late his time, but Randy was a good sport and gave a wonderful interview.  I even had most of it recorded until the last two seconds when my Audio Hijack Pro crashed and zeroed out the audio file.  Good thing the recording wasn’t running after that, otherwise I would have had to excise lots of expletives. There’s a lesson to be learned in there somewhere.  Anyway, being a great individual, Randy participated in the interview again and it’s attached to this blog posting.

One of the first things discussed was “what is cloud?” and Randy described it simply as “self service IT delivered through automation.”  So what does this mean?  Ultimately, there are three different layers to the cloud stack: software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS).  So, when you consume any of these, whether it’s an application, a platform somewhere to load your code and go, or whether it’s infrastructure to get servers or storage on demand — it’s really the whole experience of being able to get what you want, when you want it, and on your own terms.

In the rest of the podcast, Randy talks about a number of other great topics such as:

  • what kinds of businesses are using cloud
  • how you should go about evaluating it
  • how to avoid being outsourced as an IT department
  • what are the barriers to adoption; monitoring in the cloud (near and dear to our hearts)
  • designing applications for failure awareness
  • where he thinks the cloud is going

It goes without saying that Randy is extremely experienced and I learned a lot from this podcast.  You can get more information about Randy here at cloudscaling.

Alex

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Posted in cloud, IT operations | 1 Comment »

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)


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Posted in awards, cloud, IT operations, uptime | No Comments »