Sybase Monitoring

While we see big changes in the way we deliver monitoring services, the functionality of the tool is still a proof point when talking with subject matter experts.

The IBM Monitoring suite offers a huge coverage for a lot of systems, applications and containers. Find a list of supported agents on the IBM Service Engage website.

The Sybase ASE Agent enables the monitoring of SAP Sybase database servers. The agent fully integrates into the IBM Monitoring infrastructure.

The installation and configuration guide gives you insight how things fit together and how the product will be installed.

This agent is bundled with the IBM Application Performance Management suite.

The IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager Agent for Sybase ASE Reference Guidegives you detailed information about:

  • Attribute groups and attributes
  • Workspaces
  • Situations
  • Take Action commands
  • Event mapping
  • Workspaces workgroups mapped to tasks
  • Upgrading for warehouse summarization
  • Sybase agent data collection

The agent is currently supported on-premise only and still uses the IBM Tivoli Monitoring V6 infrastructure.

IBM Monitoring goes SaaS

Big changes in the IT market are taking place. We see cloud services all around changing the delivery model of software from product sale to a software as a service model.

IBM also delivers more and more parts of its portfolio in a software as a service model. One of the very first offerings is IBM Monitoring. Based on the IBM Service Engage platform the monitoring infrastructure is delivered to the customers.

But how does it work?

IBM delivers the server components in a Softlayer® data center. The infrastructure is hidden behind a firewall in combination with a reverse proxy. All customer agents and client devices are connected by using the HTTPS port (Port 443) on the announced service address.

How are the different customers separated from each other?

The user clients are connected to the correct customer specific monitoring environment based on the user credentials given on the login page.

The agents have customer specific credentials in their setup and are generated for each customer exclusively. These agents are provided upon registration for the service and can be downloaded on customer request.

How many agents should a customer have?

Well, there is no minimum number of agents a customer has to request to become eligible for IBM’s monitoring offering. However, there is a maximum number of agents a single instance of this monitoring infrastructure can serve. Depending on the complexity of the monitoring rules you apply we expect a maximum of about 1000 agents per infrastructure instance.

What kind of agents are available?

The following agents are currently available for the SaaS offering:

  • Operating Systems

    • Windows OS

    • Linux OS (RHEL, SLES)

    • AIX

  • Databases

    • DB2 UDB

    • Oracle DB

    • Microsoft SQL Server

    • Mongo DB

    • MySQL

    • PostGreSQL

  • Response Time Monitoring

  • Microsoft Active Directory

  • Virtualization Engines

    • KVM

    • System P AIX

  • JEE Container

    • WebSphere Application Server

    • WebSphere Liberty

    • Apache Tomcat

  • Languages and Frameworks

    • Ruby on Rails

    • Node.js

    • PHP

    • Python

There are several other agents planned to be released within the next few weeks or months, but I’m not authorized to write about in detail in this blog. If you want to more details, or if you have specific requirements, drop me a message, and I’ll come back to you with more specific information.

How are these agents installed?

The installation procedure is now pretty simple. The following videos show the installation on Linux and Windows. After downloading the appropriate packages for the target OS platform, the installation process can be initiated. The redesigned installation process on Linux follows now the standard installation rules for the OS platform (here now RPM).

The new IBM Monitoring is different from the previous one. The new lightweight infrastructure is available within a few minutes. The agents are easy to install and are simple to configure. The monitoring solution comes with a new user interface based on HTML without the need of any Java Runtime Environment. Because of that, the user interface is now also available on touch pads and smart phones.

Follow me on Twitter @DetlefWolf, or drop me a discussion point below if you have further question regarding the new IBM Monitoring.

 

IT Monitoring: Necessary, or just “nice to have”?

This blog was first published on Service Management 360 on 30-Oct-2013.

http://www.servicemanagement360.com/2013/10/30/it-monitoring-necessary-or-just-nice-to-have/

Why do I so often see poorly managed system environments in small and medium businesses?

Well, there are multiple reasons for that:

  • They are not aware that they deeply depend on reliable IT services.

  • IT is not their core business.

  • They don’t know what to take care of, and how to do it.

Monitoring is often seen as a nice-to-have discipline as long as IT service outages do not cause any business-relevant losses. This is often achieved by minimizing the dependencies on IT services even if this “backup scenario” is inefficient and cost intensive.

I’ve seen businesses who print every incoming email. The reason for that? Well, the email system might go down, which would prevent the company from getting any work done. Having every communication outside the IT systems protects them in the event of an outage, or so they believe. The vision of the paper-free office – forget about it!

Why don’t they introduce a monitoring solution to achieve more reliable IT services? Let’s do a quick review of the main reasons:

  • Complexity
    Monitoring requires a complex infrastructure, which has to be maintained. It requires deep knowledge of the monitoring mechanisms and the monitored applications, and the achieved results have to be frequently reviewed and amended.

  • Lack of knowledge
    What should be monitored? Which components should be under investigation? What thresholds should be set? All of these questions are absolutely valid and require time-consuming answers. And there are no “correct” answers. But there is experience in the market, and it is ready to be used.

  • Time consumption
    Small IT departments are not able to dedicate a team of people to perform professional IT monitoring. There are lots of things to do in such small operation centers, and watching a monitor wall all day is completely illusive. And to be honest, it is not a full-time job, because the number of systems is not large enough.

  • Monitoring is too expensive
    Well, cost is really the killer in every discussion. The ramp-up costs are too high. The products are too expensive. The implementation effort at the beginning is unaffordable.

But having said all that, is it now time to leave the room and tell my customers: “Yes, you are right, IT monitoring is for large businesses only”?

I think we have to address the above inhibitors very carefully and show up with alternatives for the small and medium business. Our customers’ businesses are too valuable, and unreliable IT services should not be allowed to set these services at risk.

Monitoring as a Service

As mentioned in the blog post linked above, I see the Monitoring as a Service delivery model as the best choice to cover all these challenges. But what should it look like?

First of all, we have to keep all the complexity out of sight of the service requester (that is, from you as the customer). The monitoring should just happen. The customer requests monitoring for its business services (emailing, customer portal and so on) and the service provider has to deal with it. The service provider has to have the knowledge, not the business owner.

Second, the service provider has to take care of the customer’s systems during business off-hours, to prevent system outages during normal operations, when the systems are being used frequently. This has been often seen in the past as one of the main inhibitors for small businesses. Even the system are not actively used, they still are doing background work, like database reorganizations, data backup and other administration stuff.

And now the third aspect, the investment. Customers expect to have managed availability and performance with low ramp-up costs and a quick initial implementation phase. This is only possible with service providers who have real solutions available that focus on their customers’ needs and the services these customers use. That means that industry-specific solutions are required to cover the different markets.

Below I’ll present an example scenario to illustrate these ideas.

Sample from the car manufacturing industry

A supplier in the car manufacturing industry is tightly connected to its main customer sharing IT services with him. To get connected to the principal customer’s systems this supplier has to have its own IT systems. Additionally, other specialized IT systems are on premise to serve the daily business processes, including:

  • Accounting (for example, SAP)

  • Billing (for example, SAP)

  • Emailing (for example, Lotus Notes)

  • Phone systems (for example, Ericson)

  • IT network (for example, CISCO)

The supplier’s IT systems are essential to deliver all required parts to its principal customer in the required just-in-time chain. Any failure in this process might lead to significant penalties to the supplier. The Monitoring as a Service provider should have artifacts available to quickly monitor the health and availability of theses infrastructure components and the IT services implemented on top of it:

  • Infrastructure monitoring

    • SAP monitoring

    • Lotus Notes monitoring

    • Network monitoring

  • Service monitoring

    • Accounting

    • Billing

    • Phone line availability

    • Applications on the principal customer’s systems

All these monitors require specialized, industry-specific know-how but are similar for all suppliers in this industry. The solutions could be provided in monitoring packages, including technical resource monitoring, process monitoring and availability tracking. Additionally, these packages should include reporting features for reviewing the achieved results.

Conclusion

By ordering Monitoring as a Service, small and medium businesses might overcome today’s existing inhibitors for implementing a strong control of their IT systems. With SmarCloud Application Performance Management the required products are there. Within IBM’s business partner organization and service providers, the infrastructure to deliver these services is also available. It is now your turn to act. What stops you from doing so?

Is IT monitoring for large businesses only?

This blog was first published on Service Management 360 on 13-Aug-2013.

http://www.servicemanagement360.com/2013/08/13/is-it-monitoring-for-large-businesses-only/

Could you imagine any large company leaving their IT systems unmanaged? I can’t.

These major companies have dedicated departments in place, responsible for monitoring IT system availability and performance. They are in charge of detecting issues before the business processes are affected. They also have to measure the fulfillment of service level agreements and deliver input for capacity planning on IT resources. Often they have to provide metrics to bill delivered services to the different business units.

Repeatable processes are in place to deliver these services:

  1. Sense
    First you must sense the user experience or the service quality (like sending email). If problems are detected go to phase 2.

  2. Isolate
    In multiple tier architecture application environments the isolation of the problem source is the key factor for a quick problem resolution. By having all resources under control and having transaction tracking mechanisms in place, you can quickly identify the failing resource.

  3. Diagnose
    After you identified the bottleneck, you need to perform a detailed diagnosis. You must investigate the system and its applications and make the right conclusions.

  4. Take action
    With the results from the previous step, you can then take the required actions.

  5. Evaluate
    By doing a re-evaluation you go back to step 1 and make sure that the alerted situation no longer exists and the applied action was successful.

The frequent measurement of key metrics is also used to earn data for historical analysis. Service-level measurement and capacity planning become actionable with this data.

And what about small and medium businesses?

Here I often see very limited attention given to system monitoring. In small and medium businesses often a kind of system availability monitoring with a very limited scope is performed. In some cases, the sensibility for that IT discipline doesn’t exist at all.

But what does it mean if IT systems are not available? Today, most kinds of businesses rely on IT services somehow. Any production facility, medical service, office, modern garage and so on is almost incapacitated when the IT systems are down. That means that staff can’t perform their core business roles, can’t earn money, can’t provide the services to their customers. This leads to a massive loss of revenue and reputation.

Additionally, a lot of these small and medium businesses are suppliers in a just-in-time supply chain for the large businesses (for example, a car manufacturer) and penalties apply if the delivery and production process is interrupted.

So the need for enterprise class monitoring systems exists. But why don’t they do it?

  1. It is too expensive!

  2. It is too complex!

  3. It is too time consuming!

These are the three favorite reasons I often hear. And all of them are partially true. Monitoring is a very special subject matter expert discipline. It requires detailed understanding of the monitored systems, applications and services as well as knowledge of the monitoring product used.

The purchase of an enterprise-class monitoring system might require a huge amount of money and a remarkable education effort. And it requires a kind of sustainability small IT departments can’t dedicate to monitoring. Monitoring requires repeated reviews to enhance quality, but it is not possible to keep two or three persons focused on monitoring questions because the workload for this discipline is not high enough in a small IT department and they have responsibility for lot of other things. In consequence, the skill level for this discipline declines and the results no longer justify the investment in enterprise-class monitoring.

So what now?

Is the answer “yes” on my initial question? No, it isn’t. A new delivery model is required. Enterprise-class monitoring is needed in all businesses relying on stable IT services.

The answer might be a Monitoring as a Service model. A trusted service provider could deliver such a monitoring service and overcome the above inhibitors. Because he delivers this service to multiple clients he can lower the ramp up costs for the software purchase, offer the required sustainability and bring in the expertise for monitoring systems, applications and services.

In my blog series “Monitoring as a Service” (see parts 1, 2, 3 and 4) I described a business model for using IBM monitoring solutions to set up such a service.

IBM SmartCloud Application Performance Management offers a suite of products to cover the above described five-step monitoring process, including reporting features for historical reviews and projections to the future.

So what is your impression? Are we covering the right markets? How could we enhance? Please share your thoughts below.