Are You Under Performing or Just Out of Control?

by Donal O'Sullivan, Corvil
 

“A company missing its targets is an underperforming company. A company missing its forecast is a company out of control.”

 

This was a favorite saying of an old friend of mine in sales management, and while you could argue the merits of the first sentence, the second is fairly undeniable. And yet it seems to me that when it comes to APM, many organizations fail to qualify for either category – neither underperforming nor even out of control.

 

Sounds absurd? Perhaps. But, if you think about what these sentences imply about an organization for a minute, you’ll see where I’m coming from. They clearly imply the company has (financial) performance targets, that it is forecasting its performance against these targets. It is also monitoring its achievement, and evaluating itself based on this achievement. This is almost a no-brainer for monitoring of financial performance, but not many organizations can boast the same level of maturity for their application performance monitoring.

 

Just to carry the analogy a little further, if company financial performance was tracked and reported to shareholders in the same manner as APM, then there would be a lot more senior management churn. E.g. Overall costs are up, but we’re not sure exactly why, the two areas we track in detail were unchanged, so it must have been something else”.

 

And yet today, understanding application performance has a massive impact on business success or failure — from worker retention and satisfaction to IT infrastructure spend to customer experience — so it is surprising that the current state of play is allowed to persist.

 

There are numerous surveys and much anecdotal evidence to support the view that customer satisfaction with APM is low, and that APM does not seem to prevent application outages and poor performance.

 

Why Are These Poor Results Tolerated?

Why are these poor results tolerated? There are probably myriad reasons and much disagreement about their relative significance, but a few that come to mind are:

 

- Ultimate responsibility for delivering application performance is split among many teams — network ops and engineering, application ops, software development, datacenter engineering — with no “Performance Tsar” to join the dots and, more importantly, to call the shots.

- An almost emotional attachment to outdated tools and work practices. The application delivery environment has changed dramatically, but many of the monitoring practices have not kept pace.

- A belief that what was “good enough” yesterday will be good enough for today. Just because network availability was the principle metric for network performance 10 years ago, it doesn’t mean that’s the case today.

- Crucially, it’s not always easy to relate application performance to profit and loss, or conversely, it’s not always easy to justify investment in application performance by demonstrating increased revenue or reduced costs. So the temptation to muddle through and accept the current situation is strong.

 

Confronting APM Issues

One industry which has had to confront these issues and force through solutions is electronic trading. When application performance problems can quite literally put you out of business, then application performance monitoring takes on a whole new significance.

 

These organizations have understood that their applications are directly in competition with the applications of their competitors. (The funny thing is that the same holds true for applications in other industries but the same realization has not yet been generally reached!)

 

They have taken the following steps:

- Appoint a trusted individual to own the application performance problem. Technically competent across a broad range, able to lead cross-functional teams and someone who gets things done. This individual usually reports straight to the management board for this function, irrespective of where they actually sit in the org chart.

 

- Decide on the outcomes they want and then make them happen. They don’t go the traditional route of evaluating the options available in the market and then choosing the best option – this might allow each team to settle on a solution that’s back in their comfort zone. Instead, force innovation by demanding business outcomes whether they seem reasonable or not. (The story of Steve Jobs and the fan in the iMac comes to mind.)

 

- Make sure everyone in the organization understands the importance of and is aligned behind the need to really make this happen. It’s a team, and the team is in a competition, right, so if you don’t play together you can’t expect to win.

 

- Set aggressive timelines, in phases, review results, then iterate.

 

It might all sound a bit obvious, so it’s amazing that it’s not happening in more organizations. Companies who have implemented this have reaped benefits not just in improved application performance and reduced outages. They also are able to plan and implement change with greater confidence and less risk, and they can allocate future IT spend to the areas where it will deliver the greatest impact.

How important is application performance to you?

 

Donal O'Sullivan is Vice President of Product Management for Corvil.

Questions or comments, please feel free to email: donal.osullivan@corvil.com
For more information on Corvil visit: www.corvil.com

Monitoring and Managing the Data Center

- Chuck Spears, President of Liebert North America, Emerson Network Power (www.EmersonNetworkPower.com), says:

Monitoring a Hot Topic for Data Center Managers

Data center managers are valuing visibility into their IT network and infrastructure more than ever according to a recent survey from the Data Center Users Group (DCUG), sponsored by Emerson Network Power. According to the survey of this association of data center, IT and facility managers, 56 percent of respondents listed adequate monitoring and data center management capabilities as their top data center concern. This is the highest percentage for the monitoring/management response in the history of the DCUG survey, which is now seven years running. In fact, in the five most recent DCUG surveys—all conducted over the past three years—no other concern topped that 56 percent mark. DCUG survey top three concerns 2013:

• 56 percent: Adequate monitoring and data center management capabilities 
• 52 percent: Availability 
• 45 percent: Energy efficiency 

Today’s data center is an incredibly complex environment and increasingly critical to the success of most businesses. Organizations are consolidating and virtualizing servers and putting a premium on flexibility and scalability for their IT systems, which requires a higher level of visibility into the data center infrastructure. In fact, 89 percent of those surveyed said they had implemented some server consolidation or virtualization in the last 18 months and 87 percent expect to start another such project within the year.

Ongoing consolidation/virtualization boosts density by more than 10 percent

The trend toward consolidation and virtualization is likely the cause of a sharp increase in average power density in the facilities of those surveyed. The average reported power density was 7.89 kW per rack, compared to just 6.0 kW per rack a year ago, and DCUG members do not see that trend slowing, as respondents predicted densities of 12.17 kW per rack in just two years.

Now the challenge is to maintain or improve availability in this dense computing environment, while also reducing costs and increasing efficiency. Unfortunately, organizations are struggling to effectively and efficiently manage complex data centers because typical monitoring and management tools are fragmented. Consequently, data centers do not have access to the detailed, holistic data they need to understand the relationships and dependencies between assets. Nor do these tools provide real-time data that shows how assets are functioning.

DCIM adoption increasing to aid management and monitoring

In response, data center infrastructure management (DCIM) has emerged as a discipline for managing critical infrastructure. DCIM centralizes the collection of infrastructure data to deliver a single source of truth for planning and management.

The foundation for DCIM requires establishing an instrumentation platform to enable monitoring and control of physical assets. Power and cooling systems should have integrated instrumentation and these systems can be supplemented with additional sensors and controls to enable a centralized and comprehensive view of infrastructure systems.

At the UPS level, monitoring provides continuous visibility into capacity, voltages, battery status and service events, at the branch circuit, power distribution unit and within the rack.

Installing a network of temperature sensors across the data center can be a valuable supplement to the supply and return air temperature data supplied by cooling units. By sensing temperatures at multiple locations, the airflow and cooling capacity can be more precisely controlled, resulting in more efficiency.

Communication is crucial to improving data center operations

Communication with a management system or with other devices is provided through interfaces that deliver Ethernet connectivity and SMNP and telnet communications, as well as integration with building management systems through Modbus and BACnet. When infrastructure data is consolidated into a central management platform, real-time operating data for systems across the data center can drive improvements in performance, including:

Improved availability: The ability to receive immediate notification of a failure, or an event that could ultimately lead to a failure, allows faster, more effective response to system problems. Taken a step further, data from the monitoring system can be used to analyze equipment operating trends and develop more effective preventive maintenance programs. Finally, the visibility and dynamic control of data center infrastructure provided by the monitoring can help prevent failures created by changing operating conditions.

Increased efficiency. Monitoring power at the facility, row, rack and device level provides the ability to more efficiently load power supplies and dynamically manage cooling. Greater visibility into infrastructure efficiency can drive informed decisions around the balance between efficiency and availability, allowing data center staff to focus on more strategic IT issues.

Managed capacity. Effective demand forecasting and capacity planning has become critical to effective data center management. Data center infrastructure monitoring can help identify and quantify patterns impacting data center capacity.

DCIM technologies are evolving rapidly. Next-generation systems will begin to provide a unified view of data center operations that integrates data from IT and infrastructure systems. As this is accomplished, a truly holistic data center can be achieved.

Swimming Through the Data Center

- Greg More, senior product marketing manager for power management solutions at Raritan (www.raritan.com), says:

The Deep End of the Pool

Many data centers have grown larger and more complex in recent years as the trend has been towards data center consolidation. With increasing size and complexity there is an increased need to drive intelligence to the domain of IT devices.

A data center, whether a room or an entire building, is all about what is happening at the rack. Obviously, this is where the actual computing is taking place. It is also where the vast majority of the power is being consumed, or should be. It is the web of communications within the data center, within the organization and for communications with the rest of the world. If this kingdom of IT is not properly protected and maintained there can be very serious consequences.

An interesting analogy to consider is the fish tank. At its simplest there is the goldfish bowl. As long as the water is kept clean and the right amount of fish food is supplied to the goldfish all is well. But graduating to a more complex freshwater tank with multiple types of fish requires maintenance of a more complex environment and ensuring that all the creatures will coexist. And finally, maintaining a saltwater aquarium requires a great deal of attention including careful monitoring of salinity, PH level and nitrate level, the presence of ammonia, skimming protein, etc.

Following the fish tank analogy, the right monitoring and metering at the rack can lead to some nifty data center improvements – right sizing the data center and just-in-time expansions to save on capital expenses of data center build outs, improved energy efficiency, improved IT productivity and utility, and better integration with cloud computing.

Come on in, the Temperature is Fine

There are many items to monitor and meter at the rack: electrical power, temperature, humidity, airflow, air pressure, cooling capacity and network capacity. There is also the matter of tracking IT assets.

All the monitoring, metering and tracking areas identified above require an intelligent gateway to pass the information to software which can aggregate, analyze and report the findings. The gateway can be a standalone device like a rack controller or it can be incorporated into something else needed at the rack such as an intelligent inline meter or power distribution unit (iPDU) provided the embedded computer/processor is sufficiently scalable to handle the required tasks over time. The different types of data to be gathered, the desired polling frequency and the architecture of the system will determine the amount of data to be buffered. It is important to note that some data points are more volatile than others so polling frequencies may vary, e.g., current draw is more volatile than humidity. The idea is to ultimately fully instrument the rack with an open and interoperable system with sufficient capacity to handle a variety of data with room to grow over time.

The controller should be capable of being accessed through an Ethernet LAN port to a Web-based GUI as well as command line interface (CLI) and have an LCD display for use when working at the rack itself. These communications alternatives ensure that the smart rack can be managed from anywhere. Obviously, user authentication and authorization including permissions, LDAP/S and Active Directory® and strong encryption and passwords are important for any system. SNMP is a useful and practical way to gather data from a variety of devices via their MIBs. In addition to Ethernet and serial connections, USB-A and USB-B ports are also useful such as logging to a USB stick or supporting devices such as a webcam.

Typical environment monitoring sensors include: temperature, humidity, air pressure, airflow, and contact closure to detect things like open doors. Some sensor configurations make it easy to follow best practices in monitoring temperature and humidity such as ASHRAE guidelines to place temperature sensors at the top, middle and bottom on the cool air inlet side of a rack. With the right software, data points from the sensors can be plotted on a chart mapping temperature vs. humidity to determine if your IT equipment is operating efficiently and within its thermal boundaries.

Keep Your Head Above Water 

By moving intelligence into IT equipment racks data center managers can ensure that their critical IT infrastructure is healthy and happy. 

Power metering, monitoring and control are the domain of intelligent PDUs at the rack and should be done at different levels within the rack:

·       At the overall rack PDU itself (single phase or three phase)

·       At circuit breakers within the PDU to know how close a breaker is to tripping

·       At each line for three-phase models in order to balance the lines

·       At individual outlets or user-defined groups of outlets, possibly across multiple PDUs such as when determining the power consumption of a device with redundant power supplies. 

To understand actual power consumption requires kWh data, ideally at billing-grade levels of accuracy, e.g., +/- 1%. Other useful power measurements are current (amps), Watts, voltage, volt amps, and power factor.

With a “smart rack” a number of energy and event management questions can be answered:

·       How can I save energy?

·       What is the total cost of the energy I use?

·       Who’s consuming energy and how can I bill them for that energy usage?

·       How do I maintain a safe environment for IT equipment?

·       Am I operating within ASHRAE temperature guidelines?

·       When do I inject humidity, bring in fresh air, mix hot and cold, run chillers?

·       How much power capacity do I have left for data center growth?

·       Can I get alerted when I’m loaded more than 40% on a feed?

·       How can I begin to manage CO2?

With a “smart rack” a number of asset, capacity and change management questions can be answered:

·       What do I have? How is it configured and connected?

·       Where is it located and who owns it?

·       What’s the maintenance on it?

·       How much space, power and network do I have available?

·       When do I run out of capacity?

·       Where can I put stuff?

·       How do I better utilize capacity?

·       How do I manage moves, adds, deletes? What is the impact of that change?

·       Who does the work? When is the work done? How do I know it’s done correctly?

Don’t Drink the Ocean

You don’t need to implement all the possible smart rack solutions at once. Ideally, you should be able to deploy what you need now, or what will provide the greatest improvement or fix the most pressing problem, without a major rip and replace of what exists. However, you want to keep your options open to implement additional improvements in the future without undoing or redoing past fixes.

It is possible to create a smart rack using the tools and technologies from a variety of vendors or from a single vendor’s comprehensive solution. Some vendors’ alternatives may be better suited to a particular need or deployment approach in which case selecting from a variety of vendors might be the best approach. But it is also worth considering a complete solution from one vendor to ensure interoperability and seamless integration. Also important is minimizing duplication which can occur when solutions from different vendors are merged.

Whether a single vendor or multiple vendors are chosen, remember that you don’t need to do everything at once. In fact, taking on too much can lead to paralysis as you try to decide what to do in what order.

Take the Plunge

Identify the area or areas that are most important for you to monitor, meter and manage now. Also, consider what might be next so that you are positioned to continue to make improvements. You do not want to implement a solution that will require significant modification or dismantlement to make additional progress on future projects.

Creating “smart racks” is a good way to implement data center infrastructure management (DCIM). A typical definition of a DCIM solution would include the following:

·       Asset management: Know what assets you have and where they are located 

·       Capacity management: Understand the resources available and the constraints including physical connectivity, network paths, cooling, etc.

·       Change management: Manage moves, adds and deletes

·       Power management: Understand how much power is being consumed where

·       Environment management: Understand the conditions in the data center

·       Energy management: Understand what is consuming energy and how you can minimize the costs

Use technology at the rack to create “smart racks” which can make intelligent use of all your IT resources including IT assets, power, cooling, networks and, of course, people.

Managed Monitoring Service Helps Data Centers Increase Service Levels and Staff Productivity

- Mike Parsons, vice president of support services, Datalink (www.datalink.com), says:

Data center infrastructure and services provider, Datalink, has announced a new managed monitoring service, which enables its data center customers to outsource system monitoring, alerting, problem identification, and performance analysis activities to Datalink’s managed services staff. The service is designed to help the company’s enterprise and midmarket customers maximize IT service levels for end users, free up internal IT teams to focus on more strategic work, and simplify data center operations by sourcing infrastructure, technical support and monitoring from the same provider.

The new service continuously tracks the health and performance of data center systems and applications, including unified and virtual infrastructures such as Vblock™ and Flexpod™ environments; applications hosted within either a private cloud or a third-party IaaS, SaaS or PaaS cloud environment; and servers, storage/data protection, networks and database systems. Datalink specialists monitor the systems, as well as setting filters and thresholds using industry best practices, eliminating the need for customers to allocate internal IT resources to research, deploy, and carry out day-to-day monitoring management and reporting functions.

Additional features that help optimize data center performance include:

·         Synthetic transaction capabilities that simulate the end user experience, helping to ensure the satisfaction of employees, website visitors and other end users.

·         Executive dashboards that provide real-time data and historical analysis of SLAs and capacity on both infrastructure and application levels.

·         Quick identification of root causes for fast incident resolution as well as improved overall performance of IT services critical to the business.

·         24x7 real-time notification of infrastructure health and performance issues, including automatic escalation of high-level severity events.

For more information, visit www.datalink.com. 

Enhancing SCOM Exchange Monitoring

Jean-Francois Piot, vice-president of Microsoft Global Market at GSX Solutions (www.gsx.com), says:


The need for enhanced SCOM Exchange monitoring

While SCOM for Exchange is seen as a robust monitoring tool that provides a wide range of server level statistics, many SCOM environments could benefit from more advanced user and service level monitoring and reports.

GSX Monitor and Analyzer aims to fill that gap with a powerful application performance monitoring solution that enables IT administrators and managers to proactively maintain their enterprise collaboration environment from a single user interface. Its robust executive dashboard and reporting tool highlight key trends and performance metrics, enabling you to prioritize and act on emerging issues before they impact users.

How GSX compliments SCOM
GSX compliments SCOM for Exchange in terms of simplicity, relevancy, end user performance, and reporting.

Simplicity
GSX Monitor and Analyzer can be installed and configured in less than an hour. It requires no agent on your servers, and thresholds can be configured in a matter of minutes. In-place upgrades are made via the GSX Monitor station.

Relevancy
GSX Monitor only sends alerts on issues that impact your users or service. This helps you to keep a step ahead of any issues since you don’t need to sift through hundreds of nuisance alerts to find what’s important. You can then correlate these alerts with any SCOM notifications to help quickly resolve the issues.

End user performance
GSX Monitor and Analyzer ensure performance from a user perspective. It is one thing for a server to be up and running, it is another matter entirely for the service to be performing as the user expects. GSX Monitor alerts you to user impacts and GSX Analyzer helps you with capacity planning and measuring performance against any set SLA. The focus is always on what’s most important: your users’ experience and the services you provide.

Reporting
GSX Monitor gives you access to all current statistics and graphs of recent performance. GSX Analyzer lets you view historical statistics, trend your growth, and even forecast the future. This allows you to pinpoint any negative trends, stay a step ahead of performance issues, and plan for capacity growth. What’s more, you can view a dynamic snapshot of SLA performance, set a performance indicator’s SLA, and then select the number of KPIs that are critical to achieving your SLA. If performance isn’t meeting the SLA, you can quickly determine which server is impacting it and how. For example, if server availability is supposed to be 99.9% but you see that you’re only at 98%, you can quickly locate the offending server with only 80% availability and continuous RAM utilization of 99%. To meet the SLA, you can then add more RAM or remove the server from your environment.

A comprehensive solution
To conclude, GSX Monitor and Analyze provides the comprehensive reporting and analysis you need to help fill the gaps in your SCOM Exchange environment and deliver the performance that your users expect. Together, SCOM, GSX Monitor, and GSX Analyzer provide a comprehensive solution to your Exchange monitoring, analysis and troubleshooting needs.

You Can’t Manage What You Can’t Measure in Enterprise Data Centers

- John Consoli, vice president of sales and marketing at FieldView Solutions (www.fieldviewsolutions.com) says:

Accessing real-time energy data is vital for the successful operation of today’s enterprise data centers. The adage “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” has never been more relevant to what we do. The data center’s critical resources are space, power, cooling and connectivity. Most enterprise data center managers can tell you exactly how many data ports and circuits they have available, but, at best have “guesstimates” when it comes to usable space, power and cooling. The vast majority implement safety buffers and over provision to ward off catastrophic failure. The tradeoff is catastrophic WASTE that goes right to the bottom line.

Managing today’s complex, high density data centers without real-time monitoring is like trying to fly a Jumbo airliner without an instrument panel. The value proposition for implanting a real time energy management tool literally writes itself. The ability to increase utilization of available resources by 20, 30 or 40 percent has a HUGE impact on both operating expenses and capital expenditures.

How much energy can be saved by raising data center temperatures 2-3 degrees Fahrenheit? What if you could delay or totally avoid new construction because you find that there is 30% more available power than you thought? Real-time energy monitoring can deliver both of these things, and more! We see it happen for our clients every month!!

As mentioned before how important is the instrument panel to a jumbo jetliner? FAA reports that the most advanced commercial jet monitors up to 800 data points per minute. A 5000 square foot, Tier 3 data center with a load of 5kW per rack has potentially 100 times more than that!

The biggest challenge with regard to implementing real-time energy management is two-fold"

1) People are resistant to change
2) Organizations have not developed a cohesive action plan for the data once it is collected

Data center and IT managers need to have a plan! Failure to plan is planning to fail!

The plan should be detailed and documented and involve stakeholders from IT, facilities, senior management and lines of business. It is often worth the investment to:
• Bring a professional, third party consulting firm to manage the project.
• Implement a plan for selecting the right tool, based upon the needs and goals of the organization.
• Consider vendor evaluation as a critical success factor.
• Create a documented plan for how data will be used and what the positive impact will be on corporate goals.

Implementation of real-time energy management should be important enough to be included in the company’s annual report and should be on everyone’s radar screen, up to and including the CEO.

Insist your vendors “put up or shut up.” Don’t be the first one on your block to implement their solution. Do not settle for smoke and mirror presentations. Your selection process MUST include a Proof of Concept (POC) installation at one of your sites!! The POC should have a clear, written scope that includes documentation of all acceptance criteria.

Don’t be afraid to invest resources (money, time, personnel) in the POC effort. Make this, part of your project budget from day one.

John Consoli is VP of Sales and Marketing at FieldView Solutions, the industry-leading Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) provider, which recently unveiled FieldView 5.0 IT power management tailored with Microsoft® Business Intelligence (BI) tool sets, providing access to structured data through an Open Database Connection (ODBC), with colocation support enabling application assets to be provisioned and easily maintained.

Catering to the Underserved Small Enterprise Market

- Alex Bewley, CTO at uptime software (www.uptimesoftware.com), says:

The small enterprise market has traditionally been left out when it comes to powerful IT systems management suites. Instead this market has had to rely on low-end tools, time consuming freeware or suites that lack the powerful IT management they need.

uptime software (www.uptimsoftware.com) has been successfully delivering IT systems monitoring and management software to mid-market and enterprise companies for years. The company recently announced the shipping of its flagship product, up.time, in a new version called up.time Small Business Edition (SBE), a deep, easy-to-use and powerful IT systems monitoring and management suite designed for small and medium businesses (SMB). up.time SBE is uptime software’s first foray into the lucrative SMB market and delivers full server and application monitoring and reporting across a myriad of platforms, melding deep and powerful technology with ease-of-use for a perfect SMB solution.

Designed specifically for companies requiring in-depth and easy-to-use availability, capacity and performance monitoring tools without the cost and complexity of legacy enterprise-grade software solutions, up.time SBE delivers powerful IT systems management that’s packaged and priced to meet the unique needs of small enterprises.

up.time SBE is the most recent product innovation released by uptime software and includes the exciting VMware environment monitoring capabilities introduced in October with the launch of up.time 6. In addition, SBE is quick to deploy, easy-to-use and maintain, and is delivered in a simple pricing structure. SBE is designed to monitor the entire IT stack of servers, applications and services— across virtual, physical and cloud environments, as well as multiple platforms. All of this is easily manageable through a single dashboard.

Features specific to up.time SBE include:

• Easy-to-use and Powerful IT Systems Management. Deep metrics for IT system monitoring across servers, services, applications and system resource levels give you the best performance, availability and capacity management on the market, all without the complexity of traditional enterprise tools.
• Lightening Fast Root-Cause Analysis. SBE delivers deep IT monitoring and reporting not found in the low-end and freeware tools the small enterprise market has traditionally been stuck using. up.time offers easy-to-use monitoring and reporting for fast root-cause analysis of servers and applications.
• More Proactive Problem Solving. up.time comes complete with detailed capacity planning to help create a more proactive IT department.
• A Single Tool That Monitors The Entire IT Stack. Monitor hybrid environments from a single dashboard, including virtual, physical and cloud servers and applications across many platforms (Windows, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Linux, Novell, VMware).
• Fast, Painless Deployment. The trial installs in minutes, and the entire up.time suite deploys within hours.
• Affordable and Simple SMB Licensing. Complete IT systems management for each licensed server.

Alex Bewley, Chief Technology Officer at uptime software
Alex is passionate about bridging the gap between business value and cutting edge technology. A technologist by trade, Alex’s 17-year long tour of duty included time with Sun Microsystems in its heyday. However, Alex craved a more entrepreneurial muse, and founded uptime software (with co-founder Phil Didaskalou) in 2001. When not behind his desk, Alex is either knee deep with the Toronto tech startup community or is on his iPad dreaming of new ways to simplify IT systems management across virtual, physical, and cloud environments.

Cutting Down on Workplace Productivity Loss

- Mark Ackerman, senior engineer with SuperLumin Networks (www.superlumin.com), says:

Want to know when your security measures aren’t functioning properly? Want to know what your employees are doing on the Internet? Want to know how to improve the performance of your network?

Whether you’re running a large or small enterprise, in today’s Web-centric workplace more and more organizations want to monitor access to Internet resources to accurately manage usage policies and keep employees productive—and for viable reasons too. According to IT research firm Gartner, non-work related Internet surfing results in an estimated 40% productivity loss each year for American businesses.

In response to the demand for Internet monitoring and reporting, SuperLumin Networks announced its partnership with WebSpy Vantage to provide reporting support for its Nemesis 2.3 software.

This new partnership allows enterprises to assess bandwidth consumption and identify excessive downloading from particular websites, of specific files and by which employee. Two popular reports for organizations include employee productivity and specific user browsing activity.

WebSpy Vantage support through Nemesis generates reports in HTML, Microsoft® Word, CSV or plain text and is able to distribute them securely via a WebModule.

Offering an interactive reporting interface, WebSpy Vantage also allows users to import log data from SuperLumin Nemesis, directly from servers or workstations on an enterprise network. Users can interactively drill-down into any log data and interrogate specific events, and generate a wide variety of default reports or create customized report templates.

“Webspy Vantage reporting, supported by SuperLumin, is designed to efficiently analyze gigabytes of data with a simple-to-use interface—providing an enterprise-scale monitoring solution and offering a completely automated reporting function,” said Mark Ackerman, Senior Engineer at SuperLumin Networks. “It’s the needed solution to help protect Internet usage, increase employee productivity and maximize cost savings—ultimately enhancing the bottom line.”

Benefits of Centralized Monitoring, Alarm, & Notification

Dane Overfield, product development lead at Exele Information Systems (www.exele.com), says:

Data Unification
Ensuring the reliability and efficiency of a data center involves the monitoring of many disparate types of data across multiple vendors and protocols. Real-time data such as hardware and network performance, building power management, and environmental conditions need immediate attention if behavior deviates from the desired or normal operating ranges.

Commonly, this division results in splitting the responsibility between different internal groups and the implementation of different software with varying capabilities and features. Some may implement vendor-based software solutions, while others may be able to seek solutions based on common protocols among multiple devices and equipment.

Luckily, today’s data centers can benefit from unification steps made in automation and process monitoring field since the mid-1990’s. Faced with the same dilemma of multiple vendors and protocols, the need to unify the communication has resulted in a clear winner: OPC (www.opcfoundation.orgg). OPC provides a single communication translation between those needing the data (the monitoring tools) and the underlying protocols needed to access this data. The result is an abundance of OPC-based tools like Exele TopView that can be used across industries and vendors to solve common needs.

Yet, this unification is only beneficial if the translation layer (the OPC Server) exists for the required data and protocols. Again, data centers can benefit from established vendors and third-party companies that are providing the required OPC Servers for vendor-specific data communication and open communication protocols such as SNMP, BACNet, and Modbus.

Detect… and Notify
Once the data is centralized, a single solution such as Exele TopView can monitor the current values and statuses of the disparate measurement data in an attempt to identify abnormal operating conditions within the data center.

For some data, the identification of abnormal conditions is straight-forward (e.g. power relay tripped) but others may involve more complex logic such as multiple variables, aggregates, time delays, rates of change, and deadbands. The solution must allow the user to easily specify both simple and complex conditions that indicate abnormal events in need of attention.

Immediate action requires immediate notification. The notification solution should support multiple notification channels (email, text/SMS, voice callout, audible) and notification escalation to ensure delivery of the alarm condition to those responsible for handling and correcting the abnormality. Through flexible messaging content, the recipient can learn about the alarm as well as related details and conditions of the monitored data.

Birds-eye View of Alarms
In the process and automation world, operators expect real-time displays of current measurement values and alarms. Within the data center, similar displays provide a birds-eye view of the current values, state of alarms (how many and in what areas) as well as allowing individual alarm acknowledgement and annotations. These actions can influence alarm notification (e.g. only notify if the alarm is unacknowledged for 2 minutes) and should be stored along with the alarm history for later reporting and analysis.

Learn Through History
While the real-time displays and immediate alarm detection and notification are critical to the data center operation, additional value is gained through the storage and analysis of the abnormal and alarm event activity. The personnel responsible for overall health of the data center may not need to receive individual alarm notifications, but instead may gain insight through scheduled and ad-hoc reports of global or grouped alarm activity.
For ad-hoc alarm analysis, TopView provides the tools to query and report “bad actors”, times of heavy alarm activity (flooding), and periods of high active alarms counts. Scheduled reports can deliver hourly, daily, and weekly summaries of the alarms.
Alarm reports and analyses will enable users to identify failing equipment, time-of-day related failures (e.g. power load or network), and incorrectly configured alarms.

Embrace Unification, Reap the Rewards
The required data unification tools exist today, and Exele TopView can provide centralized data monitoring, alarm detection, and notification across your data center to allow immediate response to disruptions. In addition, you gain the tools necessary to identify long-term trends in order to detect problem areas and failing equipment, optimize performance and avoid more critical failures.

Are Your Data Center Monitoring Practices Putting Critical Operations At Risk?

- Kurt Crisman, marketing manager with Network Technologies, Inc.(www.networktechinc.com), says:

Temperature, humidity, and other factors can impact data centers, telecom switching sites, and other POP sites. In a many businesses, three groups monitor environmental threats to data center and switching site equipment: network administrators or operations managers, security personnel, and maintenance employees. Often, particularly in a small or mid-sized business, monitoring of equipment may be performed by staff onsite or visiting equipment in remote locations. However, these monitoring practices may be putting critical business operations at risk.

• Damage caused by the environment can be subtle, unseen, or attributed to other causes. Condensation, rust, and heat damage is usually hidden inside machines, out of human sight.
• The frequency and quality of a site check may vary from person to person. Even if procedures and schedules are in place, adherence to those procedures and schedules may vary.
• Environment threats occur 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But staff is not always on site. Depending on staffing levels and schedules, environments can be unmonitored up to seventy percent of the time during an average week.
• Without a log of changing conditions—temperature and humidity levels constantly increase and decrease—administrators and managers cannot identify problems caused by these changes. These problems can continue for days or months, while time and money is wasted investigating false causes and solutions.
• As soon as you have people checking on equipment or performing maintenance, you can actually create problems where they hadn’t existed before. For example, boxes set in front of vents “temporarily” are not moved.

An effective server environment monitoring system addresses the weaknesses in the current practice of having personnel monitor the environment.

Network Technologies, inc. offers a range of server environment monitoring solutions that monitor critical environmental conditions that can destroy network components in a server room or POP site. When a sensor exceeds a configurable threshold, the system will notify the selected administrators/staff via email, SNMP traps, Web-page alerts and a visual indicator (LED). The systems connect to your IP network, so they can be configured and monitored from any workstation with a Web browser. Event-triggered snapshots from an IP Camera can be sent by email.

Our products provide the following benefits:

• Control costs - In a stable environment, equipment lasts longer, and less equipment is damaged and needs replaced. Typically, the savings from not having to replace equipment can pay for the cost of the monitoring system.
• Increase lead-time to fix a problem - The earlier the warning alarm sounds, the sooner personnel can solve the problem before it becomes a disaster.
• Reduce downtime - Hardware housed at the recommended environmental conditions operates more efficiently, while also shutting down less frequently. Consequently, employees stay productive, and e-commerce sites continue to generate revenue.
• Log environmental data for greater insight - In order to maintain stable conditions in the server room, administrators must have accurate records of what has happened. Logging is also critical for investigating problems.

Lowering Cooling Expenses without Risking Downtime

- Jonathan Burk, vice president at Burk Technology (http://www.burk.com/), says:

Temperature monitoring throughout the data center facilitates efficient, cost effective cooling without risking hot spots and downtime.

Cooling costs in the data center can comprise a substantial portion of an IT department’s operating expenses. While guidelines for temperatures are slowly increasing and cooling solutions become more efficient, inadequate cooling still poses a serious threat to uptime and reliability. Simply overcompensating by lowering overall temperature is a costly workaround. The only way to be certain that initiatives to lower cooling costs will not adversely impact equipment performance is to monitor temperature in multiple locations throughout the data center.

Airflow problems and improper cool air distribution can cause significant disparities in temperature in data centers, as well as in individual racks. While some servers will perform normally, others in the same location may be degrading or outright failing due to heat related problems. When attempting to run a data center efficiently, a difference of only a few degrees in one area can be the difference between reliability and costly downtime.

More than ever, it is necessary to carefully monitor environmental conditions throughout the data center. Simply monitoring ambient temperature is inadequate, as rack density, ventilation and server load have a significant impact on server temperatures. Monitoring onboard server diagnostics, while necessary, will not differentiate between problems with individual hardware and an overall system or design. Depending on the design of the data center, temperature monitoring should be implemented in each rack or, at least each row. To ensure adequate airflow throughout each rack, temperature sensors can be placed at the top and bottom of each rack.

With over 25 years of facilities monitoring experience, Burk Technology developed Climate Guard to serve the environmental monitoring needs of data centers and server rooms of all sizes. Climate Guard monitors temperature, humidity, flood/leak and many other conditions that can adversely impact uptime and reliability. Climate Guard’s built-in logging allows IT and facilities personnel to spot trends and eliminate problems before they become disasters. The system alerts staff to out-of-tolerance conditions via email, SMS and SNMP traps.

For more information on Climate Guard and to see a live demo, visit climateguard.burk.com.

IPv6 and IPv4 Monitoring: Will You be Ready?

- Vikas Aggarwal, CEO of Zyrion (www.zyrion.com), says:

In the 30+ year history of the Internet, the move to IPv6 will be the largest single upgrade. The clock is ticking on the availability of IPv4 addresses, and experts say IPv4 addresses will begin running out as early as December 2011. Many organizations are putting concrete plans in place to complete the migration over the next few years, and. through the first half of 2011, the awareness and activity on the IPv6 front has increased significantly. On June 8th, hundreds of governmental organizations, enterprises and service providers participated in a 24-hour, large-scale “test flight” of IPv6 technology. The event was coined as World IPv6 Day, and was organized by the Internet Society. The purpose of the event was to energize, educate and motivate organizations across the IT and communications industry to prepare their services for IPv6 to enable a successful migration as IPv4 addresses begin running out.

While much of the current focus on the migration to IPv6 is around the intricacies of making external facing websites and services (e.g. DNS) work cleanly in a hybrid world, as well as the use of IP addresses to interconnect distributed server, storage and network elements, organizations need to also be thinking about internal controls, management systems and frameworks as part of the transition.

A key aspect of transitioning to IPv6 technology involves ensuring that the right IT, cloud and network monitoring software systems are in place to assure the performance of complex networks, data centers and cloud infrastructures. For distributed organizations, where services may be tied to partner or remote IT infrastructure, the preparation to deal with a hybrid IPv4 and IPv6 world has to be done much more proactively. In some cases, the IT services being managed by an IT group in one department may link to data center components and applications of other departments, which could be using different IP versions. If the IT organization is on the hook to deliver against agreed to SLAs or performance levels to users and business constituents, then it needs to have visibility into the health and performance of the broader IT infrastructure that is part of its scope of coverage.

It is time to start taking steps to trial and implement network and IT monitoring software systems that can seamlessly monitor IPv6 and IPv4 applications, servers and network devices in a hybrid environment (see http://www.zyrion.com). Given that hybrid environments will coexist for a while, these monitoring solutions will enable organizations to uniformly discover and provision IPv6 devices, and collect and analyze performance data, all within one integrated system that supports IPv4 devices as well. Users can ignore the intricacies of managing different types of devices, and are able to benefit from a unified management and operational view of their entire IT infrastructure. Being able to capture performance metrics from the full IT and cloud infrastructure, and then correlating the data and linking this to supported business services is critical to ensure the effective delivery of services and assure business operations in the new dynamic environment. These systems address this need by providing a service-oriented, end-to-end, performance view, whether IPv6 based or otherwise.

Although your organization may be taking preliminary steps towards implementing IPv6 compatible infrastructure, being prepared in advance by having the management tools in place will ease the process as you make the transition from an all IPv4 to a hybrid to a fully converted environment.

Are You Able to Seamlessly Monitor Your Remote Sites?

- Vikas Aggarwal, CEO of Zyrion (www.zyrion.com), says:

Given the dispersed nature of today’s organizations, with mobile workers and regional offices, the data center and IT infrastructure in reality extends beyond the boundaries of one or more centralized physical locations. What this means is that the operations team will be required to monitor, from a central NOC location, the performance of core IT infrastructure at remote sites and offices.

The IT infrastructure, devices and applications being monitored will in many situations be behind firewalls, and in most cases, behind NAT-enabled routers. Examples of remote monitoring may include the NOC being responsible for monitoring the execution of daily automated server back-up jobs, amongst other scheduled jobs at the site. The monitoring software will need to generate an alert in the event the back-up job did not execute properly. Additionally, it may be necessary to monitor site-specific applications and servers, such as a local dispatch application, through querying core performance metrics or executing ‘synthetic’ user transactions and monitoring their responses.

In order to address these requirement, there are some key remote site capabilities that need to be available in the network monitoring software (learn more about distributed infrastructure monitoring at http://tiny.cc/rnz53). The ability to gather metrics securely from behind a firewall is critical. What this means is that the monitoring solution has to include easily deployable and low-cost remote data-gathering components that are able to process traps/syslogs/eventlogs and execute scripts locally against monitored devices and applications within the secure remote network. The remote module has to be capable of pushing the data to an upstream event management system via SSL, and not require inbound requests.

Another challenge that the network monitoring software will have to deal with is that of the remote sites and office networks having overlapping or duplicated IP ranges. It’s extremely likely that many of the remote sites are using some parts of the 192.168.x.x network. The monitoring solution has to account for this scenario, and uniquely identify site-specific devices without requiring the re-addressing of the networks just so that they'll be easier for the IT operations team to monitor and manage.

The ability to monitor and manage secure remote sites is becoming a key requirement for distributed organizations. Make sure your network monitoring software supports remote site monitoring behind firewalls and with over-lapping IP addresses, and includes coverage for a wide range of network infrastructure (see examples at http://tiny.cc/y5rat) to ensure the smooth running of your business operations.