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GroundWork White Paper
by Thomas Stocking
White Paper: Reporting on Monitoring Data
This white paper describes the ideas we have used to assemble the reporting systems in GroundWork Monitor. This article focuses on the concepts that make great reports possible, and will hopefully give you some ideas of what’s important for you to report on, and how.
Collaborate with GroundWork to reach new customers and benefit from GroundWork Open Source marketing, selling, and technical resources.
GroundWork PartnersGroundWork Partners are in a unique position to offer their customers a single solution for all their IT monitoring needs. Competitive pricing means our software is the perfect tool for a range of customers, from SMB to the Fortune 500. Our short, predictable sales process makes it easy to grow your revenue with GroundWork Monitor.
The GroundWork System Administrator training is lab-intensive, so you’ll get plenty of hands-on experience. Labs are held in the Amazon Cloud with trainees assigned individual Windows and Linux instances.
This is a 6-day inclusive course delivered over a 3 week period. All dates are Tuesdays and Wednesdays and run from 8am to 2pm PST.
For more information or to register for GroundWork training or GWCSA certification please contact us at 1-415-992-4500 or training@gwos.com.
GroundWork Monitor 8 is a new version of a mature product, GroundWork Monitor Enterprise. As such, a lot of what is inside of this version will be familiar to users of prior versions. For example, we are still using the same bundled GPL Nagios™ and GroundWork Distributed Monitoring Agent (GDMA), and we are still including NeDi and Cloud Hub as data feeds.
Then again, much is very new. We have completely re-worked the status screens and made them much more responsive. There are lots of new ways to view the state of your monitored resources, and to drill into the history and performance of the metrics you collect. Read More
Capacity planning in a multi-cloud environment is a complex challenge affecting most (if not all) organizations. Cloud based infrastructure has added to the complexity, both in cost and optimization. Organizations must optimize the performance of their hosted applications, but also plan for future growth while justifying cost. This paper focuses on the variables to consider for an effective capacity plan, and explains how monitoring removes the guesswork by providing quantitative data organizations can use to make better decisions about their infrastructure.
For more information see Capacity Planning: Monitoring for Success
GroundWork welcomes LLD Internacional as a new South American partner!
LLD Internacional, S.A.
2 Calle 2-48 C7 Villas de Picasso
Fraijanes, Guatemala
www.lldsa.com
info@lldsa.com
(502) 5715 5045
at Kongress-Zentrum Kreuz in Bern Switzerland – Register
Hosted by: RealStuff Informatik AG Sponsored by: Elastic, GroundWork Open Source, and NeDi.
Modern cloud-based application and infrastructure monitoring is a moving target. And it is one that very much depends on how “native” your cloud application is.
Here is a list of monitoring metrics capabilities you should look for that pertain to time series and events:
1. Some way to track throughput
It can be as simple as counts of requests or transactions processed. This will vary a lot depending upon your use case—do you log requests, transactions, use queues, etc? At a minimum, you should be able to get that data on a fairly frequent basis and then graph it for context.
2. Storage monitoring
Storage is elastic, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t watch how much is getting stored. Simple errors like forgetting to reset a debug flag on a log can quickly consume many gigabytes. RDS in EC2, for example, can tell you how much data is committed—you should watch for it to peak when you don’t expect it.
3. Health checks on micro-services
Most frameworks for micro-services are capable of telling you with a simple query whether they are healthy. In the cloud, that’s often available in the API of the cloud services manager. Your micro-services (or meshed services) should be able to check in or be checked, and your monitoring tool should have a way to do that.
4. A threshold on backlog of transactions
Referring back to #1, it’s not only important to track throughput, but you should also track backlog. It will tell you when you need more resources faster than any detailed measurement from deeper in the apps.
There are many other monitoring metrics to consider, but these four are the ones that we’ve seen most commonly bite customers as they’ve moved to cloud-based monitoring.
This is a short piece highlighting how open source and enhanced open source software like GroundWork and others (we can use big examples like Atlassian and Cloudera) are now taken as mainstream components for many company toolsets.
There is a concept in selling products that are “sticky,” or that are not easily or cost-effectively changed out. Product categories like monitoring tend to be sticky, in that there is a significant investment in planning and implementation, in technology such as client-side agents to deploy, and significant license cost. All of these make switching to a competing product less likely. Read More
Thomas Stocking, co-founder and vice president of product strategy, recently wrote an article titled How to Efficiently Discover Network Resources, featured in The Data Center Journal. The article talks about network discovery tools and processes, and why it’s important to automate and standardize. Many business processes (security management, service delivery and service support) depend on the administrator’s knowledge of the network details.
