Servers & Applications

Business Challenges

The network infrastructure is a rapidly-evolving environment containing hundreds of devices from a wide range of vendors. Each piece of equipment must be understood and analyzed in real-time and proactively, in order to identify trends and provide visibility to yours operation, engineers and customers.

Solution Overview

APG is a performance and service level management solution allowing effective management of the performance of the overall business. APG provides full visibility of the server and application infrastructure. The data collection is agent-less and covers tens to thousands IT infrastructure components.

Multiple views are available for server performance monitoring, application monitoring, transaction monitoring, and virtualization monitoring. The APG dashboard presents information per individual component or for a group of components. Information is available in real-time - helping operational staff to troubleshoot problems rapidly. Historical reporting, combined with baseline and trending analysis, allows organizations to proactively monitor their infrastructure and verify compliance with contracted service levels.

Key Features

Physical and Virtualized Servers Monitoring

APG collects raw performance metrics on Windows and UNIX servers using an agent-less mode, that leverages either the server's native SNMP service or the commercial agent (e.g.: CA SystemEdge, IBM Tivoli agent). Non-SNMP servers can be polled through WMI queries or SSH command line. The agent-less data collection has multiple advantages: easy to deploy and maintain, non intrusive, reduce risk of affecting production system, and adapted to data-centers where servers environments are fairly static by nature. Once collected, the data is analyzed in real-time and any potential problem results in an alert to the operation teams or is presented in the web dashboard.

Application Monitoring

APG provides pre-defined, out-of-the-box performance monitoring support for more than 15 different applications (i.e.: Oracle, MySQL, Microsoft SQL, Apache, IBM WebSphere, and more). APG performs granular monitoring of these applications and accurately evaluate their health, reduce downtime, and improve user's experience.

Transaction Monitoring

With APG, organizations can set up scheduled synthetic transactions that regularly check the availability and response-time for a given IT service. A library of various monitors is available to measure and analyze web servers URLs, DNS/DHCP services, and all TCP-based user transactions. Metrics are compared against normal baselines and an alert is sent when downtime or performance degradation are detected.

Hundreds of standard reports

The Watch4Net APG core software comes prepackaged with hundreds of predefined and ready-to-use standards reports, providing your business with real value from day one. Reports are categorized by: Inventory, Performance Scorecards, TopN, Situations to Watch, Service Levels, and Capacity Planning. Default thresholds conditions are aligned with best-practices and can easily be modified to suit your infrastructure and service levels.

Flexible Reporting

APG's pre-configured reports provide comprehensive reporting possibilities for most IT environments. However, there are situations where an administrator might have to define his own set of indicators and reports. APG includes all necessary tools to let you customize reports or create new ones from the ground up. Included in APG, a graphical wizard-driven Report Builder and a Formula Editor use mathematical and Boolean operators to define custom key performance indicators (KPI). Furthermore, the automatic grouping of resources will help defining reports with the use of rules and/or regular expressions which can leverage naming conventions and IT policies.

Secure Web Portal with role/profile access control

Today's security requirements in large organizations require highly sophisticated role based access. APG provides a GUI-based Security Manager to meet those requirements. Roles and profiles can be created to provide restricted access throughout the site, including to reports, groups of reports or devices, to limit administrative rights to specific users or groups providing the granularity that you need.

Interfaces with major management applications

APG can work as a standalone system or can be integrated with adjacent systems in order to design a complete solution aligned with best-practice process frameworks. Interfaces are available with EMC Smarts, Microsoft SCOM, and other solutions allowing organizations to retrieve and consolidate all relevant performance metrics and events into the APG dashboard.

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