IT Monitoring Buyers’ Guide_2013

7/27/2019 IT Monitoring Buyers Guide_2013

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IT Monitoring

Buyers Guide 2013


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Table of Contents

Why You Should Keep Reading 2

The Standard Introduction 3

The Discussion of Needs 3

The Listing of Use Cases 4

The Enumeration of Software Options 5

The Key Criteria 6

The Key Features 7

The Brief GroundWork Section 8

The Inevitable Table 9

Why You Should Keep Reading

If you want to cut to the chase on the ways to monitor your IT and applications,

and the pluses and minuses of each approach, then keep reading...

If you want to know the key trade-offs of the types of software out there, then

keep reading...

If you want to find out what kind of monitoring solutions have been proven to

work and why, then keep reading...

2013 GroundWork, Inc. All rights reserved

IT Monitoring Buyers Guide

2


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The Standard Introduction

This is not your typical Buyers Guide.

There are dozens of monitoring solutions (also known as tools) out there and

dozens of ways to run your IT. To claim that any vendor has the absolutely-in-

all-situations perfect for you software borders on the insane. Lets get real.

Instead, well address youthe intelligent IT buyerwithout fluff on service

assurance, and IT operations efficiency. Well reserve our comments about our

own product to one small section on the last page. The rest of the space here is

devoted to giving you a more informed view of what the market offers, and what

capabilities and features are important for different types of customers.

Because theres no such thing as sucky monitoring software1. Only sucky

monitoring software for yourneeds.

The Discussion of Needs

Which Monitoring Benefit(s) Do You Need?

If youre reading this paper, theres something in your IT world that you want

better insight into. Thats usually for one (or more) of 4 reasons. Each of which

leads you to highlight certain things in your buying decision that your software

should be able to deliver.

1. Improve Application Performance

2. Keep Availability High

3. Provide Evidence of Past Service (Reporting / SLAs)

4. Prevent Intrusions and Maintain Security

So, which of these do you care about and what does that mean?

If youre trying to improve performance, whats most important is measuring

resource consumption patterns to find bottlenecks to eliminate.

When you have the time to find bottlenecks, you can decide if processes, people

or technology can be deployed to eliminate them. This usually reveals another

bottleneck right behind it, but hey, its good to be busy. Heavyweight solutions

that bog down memory or CPU are also a problem, as they can impedeperformance.

If youre trying to improve availability, whats most important is alerting and

notifications. Rapid access to context around issues can help you figure out

whats wrong and get the business service restored. This contextual data can

help with determining the appropriate rapid response, and once service is

restored, diagnosing the root cause. Notifications, Dashboards, Alerts (and

Alert Suppression!), and the status view(s) of system health are very important.



3

In a survey of 711 global IT

managers at companies

of various sizes and

representing a variety ofindustries, nearly all or

90 percent say they do

not have confidence in

themselves to find

problems before end

users are impacted.

Source: SevOne Market Survey 2012

SevOne, 2012

1 Exception: actual sucky monitoring software.


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For handling reporting and SLAs, whats most important is continual

measurement of important information. An appealing way to present that

information prevents snoozing too. You can also just export it out to where it is

needed for other analysis and record keeping. Collecting a broad set of data ismost important.

Ifsecurity and intrusion prevention are your key needs, then... youre in the

wrong place. The software category you are probably looking for is called SIEM

(Security Information and Event Management). Sometimes its the realm of IT

Operations; sometimes not. In either case, you wont read about it in the rest of

this paper.

The Listing of Use Cases

There are hundreds of use cases for what to monitor in IT. Here are four

common ones:

1. Data Center

Data center monitoring is about covering all the devicesmostly servers,

network, and storageand extracting relevant data from them. When

things stop responding or respond slowly, theres an issue.

2. Clouds

The same monitoring that you do in your data center can be done in the

Cloud, with the additional benefit that you are keeping an eye on your Cloud

provider. When things go down, you get the inordinate pleasure of calling

them up and WTFing them in preparation for future price negotiations. File

away the phrase: What, you didnt know it was down? for giggles.

3. Other Monitors

You already use some tools to measure web site response times, line card

fan speeds and server health. Three IDs, passwords, password strength,

expirations, UIs and other general annoyances. By putting all that data into

a single manager of monitors, you can relentlessly search for the

background around any alert or notification.

4. Customers

This is the xSP scenario, where x used to stand for Managed and

increasingly, Cloud. SP is Service Provider. Here you are often monitoring

a heterogeneous mix customized for each customer and the most importantview is the customer overall. Looking at all the storage, or all the servers

you monitor at once is useful, but not as useful as the customer view.



4

60% of respondentsselected applicationperformance as an

inhibitor for moving

applications into the

Cloud.

Source: Cisco Global Cloud Networking

Survey Cisco, 2012

Currently an average of31% of all IT applications /services are in the cloud

(up from 7% in 2011). In

two years time,

companies would like to

have around half their IT

applications / services in

the cloud (52%).

Source: Cisco CloudWatch Summer2012 Cisco, 2012


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The Enumeration of Software Options

What Can I Buy?

Disclaimer, Disclaimer, Disclaimer:

First of all, remember that your problems will be solved by a combination of

Tools2, Process, and People.

Many times, Process gets too little investment and Tools get too much

investment. You cant sell Process (though we know a lot about it). We wont be

much help on People issues, but make us an offer...

There are dozens, if not hundreds of products and opensource software that

provide at least one monitoring function. Weve broadly grouped them as

follows:

1. Point Tools (Fluke, NagVis, NeDi, etc.)

These tools typically do one thing, but do it well. They might sniff at

packets on a network link, or let you visualize network traffic. Each

scratches an IT itch to see whats happening, but the rash (performance,

availability, or reporting needs) usually remains.

2. Infrastructure Monitoring (Nagios, SolarWinds, Zabbix, Zenoss, etc.)

These software take a category of the IT infrastructurelike Windows

servers, applications, network switches, storage, etc.extract information

and present it back to you in useful ways. Most of the hardware-vendor

provided tools fall into this category, for example.

3. Manager of Monitors (BMC, CA, GroundWork, HP, IBM, etc.)

These products take the category above and also operate to pull data from

other sources. Theyre suites or platforms more than point solutions.

Usually, they gather their own data and can also work with other monitors to

harness the data that they collect, and provide some end-user experience

capabilities. They usually monitor applications and infrastructure. See

below.

4. End-User Experience / Website Monitoring (Neustar, Keynote, Gomez,

etc.) is almost a separate space that focuses on the transactions that flow

through IT systems instead of the systems and applications themselves.

They are complementary and orthogonal to regular IT monitoring.

Typically, End-User Experience focuses on either synthetic transactions

(simulating complex, but real-world, interactions), geographic diversity(trying many transactions from different locations) or even load testing

(trying many transactions at once). Often, this is a service that monitors the

health of your eCommerce system or website.



5

21% of companies

surveyed are operating

data centers at the

highest level of efficiency.

Source: Data Center Efficiency By the

Numbers IBM, 2012

2 When someone says their software tool is a assurance solution, watch your wallet.


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2013 GroundWork, Inc. All rights reserved6

The Key Criteria

How many ways can you pull in data?

Software that can pull in data in a myriad of methods is best. Theres two major

axes to consider:

Integration vs. Direct Agent vs. Agentless

Software should be able to pull in

data in lots of ways, including:

Direct data gathering (SNMP)

Import via API

Import via batch process

(including annoying but

functional CSV imports)

Direct screen display of other

softwares data

Exotic methods (for example

IPMI is still exotic in 2013)

Web services

Integration gives you freedom to

use your existing processes and

software tools. Most organizations

like a handful of tools that they have

gotten to work well.

If someone is telling you they can

clear out all of your other software

with theirs (including us after we

forget we wrote this), flee. Wave

this in their face and note that

single tools can risk vendor lock-in,

inflexible workflows, and losing

valuable skill with great tools.

This can be a religious war in some

monitoring circles. Rather than risk

getting burned at the stake, just

know what they are:

Agents take up space on

monitored devices, and yes,

they have to be managed. In

return, you limit network traffic

dramatically.

Agentless approaches dont

require installing software on

monitored devices, but can limit

your overall scalability.

Agents bundle and compress

information, then send it to the

master database. Agentless

approaches send small bursts of

information continuously.

As a rule of thumb, if youre

monitoring devices in a single

location, either approach can work

for you. If anyone says that only

one approach is good, raise one

eyebrow skeptically and pause

dramatically.


FAQDoes it work with my stuff?

This is pretty basicwill it (directlyor indirectly) get data out of thethings I want to monitor. Luckily,SNMP and other basic methods arenearly ubiquitous for at least gettingsome data out of your hardware.Similar methods exist forapplications, such as MBeans foraccessing key metrics in Javaapplications.

Many of the open source-basedsoftware can access a large library of

plugins (scripts that handle the gropof getting data from device A informat B).

Whos writing this softwareanyway?

Youve got two major optionsopensource community or everyone else(commercial companies of variousflavors).

The open source community is like apunching bagsturdy, but hard tomove in a given direction. If you

need something, youll have to do ityourself on your own timetable.

Commercial companies will listenand guide their offerings to theneeds of customers. You are a paidcustomer so you are paying to beheard in future product releases. Ofcourse, this costs you money, butcan save you time.

Also, are they writing it using aprogramming language anddatabase thats proven & robust?

Does it scale to meet my needs?

Find out about prior installations. Inall fairness, some technologies donot scale as well as others, so askabout key decisions that were madefor development platform, databasetopology, etc.


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The Key Features

Thats all well and good, but there are some features that come up time and

again. Lets touch on a few:

How does the software indicate to a viewer that something is wrong. On the

simple end you have an event console; on the more complex end you have

dashboards, compressed high-data icons with multiple colors / fills and more.

So something does really seem to be wrong enough that I want something to

happen. Do you want a person actively notified through one or more methods?

Phone, email, mobile, etc.

Lots of things can go wrong in IT. Filtration prevents too many events from

reaching you at the same time. If you are managing by watching a list of events

go by and handling the ones in red, if 500 come at once, forget about it.

Filtration hides the less important event information to let the most important

ones shine through.

How simple is it to schedule thingslike planned downtime and maintenance?

SLAs without scheduled downtime are ugly.

More is better. Data ingest is good. Data ingest, plus slapping displays from

other software on a dashboard, plus API access to other software (like help

desks) is better.

Another War of the Roses out there in monitoring. Dynamic thresholds allow

you to have thresholds that change with either usage, time or some other

circumstance. It implies that there is poor performance or availability at one

time that is acceptable at one time but not another.

Clean tables of numbers and pretty graphs that explain how awesome you are.

Very important.

A little different from status screens, these are meant to give information at a

glance. Multiple data formats that compress a lot of information into a little

space are helpful. Ultimately, dashboards are paintings that reflect what your

organization needs. Look at sample dashboards, but envision your own

masterpiece from the available palette.

Find out (or confirm) what you have out there on your network, without flooding

your network with traffic. This includes any responsive hardware you havedeployed, and could even include applications. Or you might just need a place

to list everything for the next counting.

Need to know when you are going to run out of space / bandwidth / CPU /

memory / power / heat-generating stuff / clever server names based on an SF

theme / things for people to complain about? Well, software that can give you

advance warning of that by predicting consumption or modeling usage trends

can give you a jump on that joyous day.

There are many others, but this is a guide, not a novel.



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Alerts

Notifications / Actions

Event Filtration

Scheduling

Integration Points

Dynamic thresholds

Reporting

Dashboards

Discovery (or Inventory)

Prediction and Trending


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The Brief GroundWork Section

OK, we promised wed only talk about GroundWork for one little section, and

here it is:

GroundWork incorporates the best technology the open source world has to

offer and combines it with real-world customer feedback to make a product.

Its an affordable, updated, supported, tested, and regularly improved tool. We

founded the company on the belief that fantastic software can be had without

writing it from scratch, by using the best parts of the open source community.

By using the wisdom of real-world usage and workflows, GroundWork adds what

is needed to make a fully-functional, complete product. This product can

provide powerful monitoring without the cost of entirely proprietary software or

the time sink of creating or integrating your own tools.


All other copyrights and trademarks are properties of their respective owners


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About GroundWork

The leading open platform for network, application, and cloud monitoring, for

companies with heterogeneous operating systems, application and hardware

environments who want to reduce ongoing monitoring costs, consolidate views

and improve staff productivity.

Contact Uswww.gwos.com 866-899-4342

[email protected] +1-415-992-4500

GroundWork, Inc.

201 Spear Street, Suite 1650

San Francisco, CA 94105
http://www.gwos.com/mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]://www.gwos.com/


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The Inevitable Table

Use this handy table when evaluating vendors.

Good Stuff Bad Stuff

Company

Support

Services Available (incl. Training)

Commitment to You

Vision

Product

Coverage of Devices

User Interface

Notifications

Integrations

Reporting

Alerts

Financial

Up Front Cost (Licensing)

Switching Cost In

Switching Cost Out

Annual Cost (Maintenance or

Subscription)

What Does this Mean for Me?

Administration

Training

Reporting

Services



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IT Monitoring Buyers’ Guide_2013

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