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How Does Your Monitoring Solution Deal with Maintenance?

Friday, November 23rd, 2012

Performing maintenance is never fun.  It’s time consuming, and sometimes issues might arise during maintenance that make you want to pull your hair out. Regardless, to maximize uptime, we all have to do it from time to time.  Whether we are talking about IT infrastructure or automobiles, it’s just something that has to be done.  In the context of IT infrastructure, whether you are fixing a hardware issue or just performing regular maintenance like patching or upgrade, it’s a necessary evil.  There are a few things you need to consider when you are performing maintenance on your servers and devices when you have a monitoring solution in place.

Alert Noise

If you know you have to bring your car(s) into the shop for repair, you would clear your calendar and not make any plans because you won’t be able to go anywhere.  Similarly, if you have to bring your servers down for maintenance, you know they won’t be working as they normally would.  You know your monitoring solution will cause a “sea of red” and send out tons of alerts.  Life does not have to suck.  You can schedule maintenance in up.time so that alerts will not be triggered during the maintenance window.  If you have to bring systems down for an emergency, you can also do it in an ad-hoc manner as well.

Accuracy of SLA

If you are measuring Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in your environment, most likely you won’t want to count maintenance against your SLA.  Most maintenance times are scheduled.therefore, frequency of maintenance is something that you and your customer had agreed on.  If scheduled maintenance decreases your SLA, it will skew the actual expected availability.  Consequently, up.time provides the option whether you want scheduled maintenance to count against your SLA.  Notice I said scheduled maintenance and not ad-hoc maintenance.  Ad-hoc maintenance is something that’s not planned, which means customers will experience unplanned outage and should be counted against the SLA.  Whether it’s scheduled or ad-hoc maintenance, you can count on up.time to accurately measure your SLA.

Most people don’t think about how maintenance could affect monitoring and SLA reporting in their IT environment.  Make sure you don’t get caught in the cold. Take control over how you manage your IT infrastructure.  Download up.time’s 30 day free trial and see the difference!

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Posted in IT Management, IT operations, monitoring, sla | No Comments »

Plug-In to the up.time Grid

Monday, June 6th, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

Stay positive and stay tuned for further details.

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Posted in IT operations, uptime | No Comments »

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 »

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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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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Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

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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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 »

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’)

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Posted in Cloud Virtualization, IT Management, monitoring, Systems Management, Uncategorized, uptime | No Comments »

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