Data Centers Monitoring

Business Challenges

The data center 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. Organizations need a solution allowing them to:

  • Ensure high application service quality to end users
  • Provide visibility to support IT deployments
  • Demonstrate efficiency gains on investments
  • Increase productivity of operational staff for problem resolution

Solution Overview

The APG Software Suite provides a single pane of visibility across critical applications, databases, Web servers, and network and security devices. Information is analyzed in real-time and presented to Operations Managers and Customers. The APG Software Suite is an integrated and modular system providing detailed insight on:

  • Network
  • Load-balancers
  • Application tiers
  • Physical and virtual server tiers
  • Storage infrastructure
  • Service levels experienced by end-users

Key Features



Acute visibility on Data Center infrastructure

  • APG provides the visibility and control you need to:
  • Troubleshoot data center problems faster across network, load-balancers, servers, applications, and storage
  • Make informed virtualization decisions during data center consolidation projects
  • Gauge the effectiveness of the WAN optimizers for application acceleration
  • Understand traffic trends inside and between dispersed data-centers
  • Measure the end-users experience, using simulated transactions
  • Plan your future growth using forecasting models
  • Verify compliance with service levels with comprehensive SLA reports

Device Monitoring

APG for Data Centers polls and analyzes Routers, Switches, Firewall, Load-Balancers, WAN optimizers, and LAN/WAN links. Preconfigured reports display information at the device level and for a group of devices (e.g.: Summary, TopN, Exceptions). This information is crucial to effectively troubleshoot problems, understand usage and trends, and demonstrate efficiency gains.

Physical and Virtualized Servers Monitoring

APG collects raw performance metrics on Windows and UNIX servers using an agent-less mode. This approach 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 lines. The agent-less data collection has multiple advantages, like: easy to deploy and maintain, non intrusive, reduce the risk of affecting production system, adapted to data-centers where server environments are fairly static by nature. Once the data are collected, it is analyzed in real-time and any potential problem results in an alert to the operation teams and/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, including: Oracle, MySQL, Microsoft SQL, Apache, IBM WebSphere, and more. APG performs granular monitoring of these applications to accurately determine their health, reduce downtime, and improve the user experience.

Transaction Monitoring

With APG, organizations can set up scheduled synthetic transactions to regularly check the availability and response-time for a given IT service. A complete set of monitors are 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 is detected.

Traffic Monitoring

APG integrates various technologies - such as Cisco Netflow, IP-SLA, QoS, WAN optimizers statistics, Load Balancers statistics - to provide a comprehensive view of the traffic inside a data-center, and between dispersed data-centers. This data provides details about applications running on the network and users exchanging data, down to the end-to-end conversations. The information enables network managers to analyze problems, understand resource usage, and plan new applications' deployments.

Storage Monitoring

APG provides service-oriented visibility on enterprise storage infrastructure. Monitored elements include SAN disk arrays (FC and iSCSI), NAS, tape libraries, fabric switches, and servers. Storage reports are valuable for troubleshooting storage problems, capacity planning, inventory, chargeback (allocated disk space per customer), and service level monitoring.

SLA Monitoring

By consolidating both business and technology metrics, APG allows contractual SLA measurement and reporting. The product's flexibility can define complex mathematical SLA formulas, exclude maintenance periods, track in real-time the SLA compliance, and at the end publish SLA reports to customers.

Interfaces with major management applications

The APG product 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 for EMC Smarts, Microsoft SCOM, and more. The interfaces allow organizations to retrieve and consolidate all relevant performance metrics and events into the APG dashboard.

Benefits

  • Accurate real-time picture of the infrastructure health
  • Agent-less monitoring covering tens of IT infrastructure components
  • Detailed reports for Performance Management / Capacity Planning
  • Health monitoring for network, servers, databases, applications
  • Adaptive alerting on network, servers, databases, and applications
  • Inventory Assets reports
  • Traffic analysis
  • Service Level Management
  • Personalized Web-based views to operations, engineers, and customers
  • Minimize cost and downtime with one complete solution

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