up.time Product Review
Introduction
Infrastructure monitoring and management for the Mid-Enterprise is fundamentally problematic. They have the need for deep monitoring of virtual, physical and cloud environments and applications; however the low end tools can’t provide the depth they need and the Big 4 tools are too expensive and complex to be realistic. The result can be multiple utilities managing separate infrastructure layers often preventing administrators from fully utilising them. Couple this with the complexity of geographically dispersed infrastructure and quite quickly, management and monitoring can become, at worst, a hindrance rather than a benefit.
uptime software has acknowledged these issues and put some real thought into providing a cohesive cross-platform suite of management and monitoring software packaged as the up.time suite. The collection is positioned as complete systems management solution designed from the ground up to provide the unified view that enterprise administrators crave for but without the price tag and complexity typically associated with the large systems management frameworks from vendors such as Microsoft, BMC, CA, and IBM.
The up.time suite is comprised of a massive 10 solutions covering the following areas:
- Monitoring Multiple Datacenters
- Server Monitoring & Reporting
- Virtual Server Monitoring & Reporting
- Cloud Monitoring & Reporting
- Server Consolidation & Virtualization
- Capacity Planning & Reporting
- SLA Monitoring & Reporting
- Application Monitoring and Reporting
- Application Transaction Monitoring
- Proactive IT & Outage Avoidance
The architecture consists of an up.time server, called a Monitoring Station, with a web based management console from which endpoint discovery and agent deployment is administered.
Key to note at this point is the per-physical-server licensing model they’ve adopted across the board, even in virtual environments. Just count the number of physical servers and that’s it, no add-ons, tiers, or management packs.
Fig 1: Management and monitoring architecture
This review primarily focuses on three important aspects of the suite which are of key relevance to virtualization:
- Service Level Monitoring and Reporting
- Virtual Server Monitoring and Reporting
- Application Monitoring and Reporting
Service Level Management
Enterprise IT managers are constantly looking for better ways to report on infrastructure services and SLA targets. In the past, this has often been difficult to achieve where infrastructure is dispersed across different geographies, as well as often having unknown or misunderstood SLA’s. The up.time suite contains dedicated SLA tools which provide these key practical features:
- Readily define and document agreed SLA’s, then link them through to the appropriate infrastructure service
- Pinpoint potential SLA breaches in real time, providing the administrator the ability to proactively react and resolve
- Automatic trigger responses eliminating human error
Fig 2: SLA monitoring for critical infrastructure services
Example Use Scenario: An infrastructure web service is monitored by up.time with configured SLA’s and trigger responses. A specific trigger is defined in relation to incoming web traffic. When the threshold is exceeded, the trigger event starts. An automated process deploys additional resources to the web server ensuring that it is not overloaded resulting in an outage or poor user experience.
Fig 3: SLA Monitoring
VMware Monitoring and Management
Today’s IT managers not only have to maintain infrastructure service availability at 99.999% but are also challenged to be seen to be doing everything they can to reduce its carbon footprint including power and cooling savings.
Once upon a time organizations may have used individual toolsets that monitored different platforms, eg: UNIX, Windows, Linux, Novell etc, and with the introduction of virtualization, a further layer of infrastructure is added, creating extra complexity.
uptime software has worked closely with VMware to achieve a deeply integrated solution to make sure that the application is able to support all existing and new releases of the platform.
Key aspects of this feature are:
- Workload monitoring leveraging many available metrics
- Capacity planning for physical server consolidation and optimization
- Role-based dashboards across all IT assets, eg: virtual, physical, cloud
- VMware Orchestrator integration for creation of flexible automated workflow processes to prevent recurring issues
Fig 4: Workload Report
Application Monitoring and Reporting
Today’s datacentres not only support many physical and virtual machines but also host vast numbers of applications. One of the primary challenges with large portfolio’s is dealing with multiple monitoring solutions which need separate screens, licenses and skillsets to operate them. up.time aims to address this with a single solution that can be configured out of the box to monitor multiple applications from a single pane of glass.
Seamlessly leveraging the other functions within the suite, SLA’s for each application can be added and then reported, ensuring that IT is aligned with the business. The information gathered during the monitoring of the applications can be used to create meaningful reports tailored to both IT and business with nominal effort.
Key aspects of application monitoring are:
- Centralized application monitoring for a wide range of systems and platforms, including Messaging, CRM, ERP, Web, etc. Individual metrics can also be defined which allows any 3rd party commercial software to be monitored
- Granular server and application monitoring with root cause analysis
- End to end service monitoring, find and fix performance issues together with availability monitoring and reporting
Fig 5: Application Availability Report
Ease of Installation and Initial Configuration
Monitoring agents are designed to be cross-platform compatible and can be installed on a number of leading Operating Systems, including many variations of Unix, Linux, Windows and VMware.
The installation process only takes a few simple clicks. The VMware installation is made even easier as it is provided as a pre-installed appliance that is can be imported into a virtual infrastructure.
The testing platforms used during this review included Windows 2003(x86) and the VMware appliance which runs as a CentOS VM. In both cases the installation was simple with clear instructions to follow. We were up and running ready to start collecting data in a matter of minutes.
In all cases the management of a monitored environment is achieved through a web portal which is exceptionally clean and easy to read. After entering some basic information the ‘My Portal’ home page is displayed. This page presents a summary list of current alerts together with saved reports and support links. A key aspect is the directly accessible tutorials which are web based and again very clear; this is a real plus as it eases the administrator into the product quickly and easily. The help documentation is also online but local to the server and thoroughly covered in a point/click style.
Fig 6: My Portal
The portal features a fully-fledged role based permissions function, which includes users, distribution lists and groups, each with flexible role options to configure tiers of access. A neat feature that stood out to us was the ability to effectively ‘out of office’ a user. For example, if they happened to go on vacation, it can optionally halt the generation of email alerts and reports reducing unwanted ‘noise’ for a period of time.
It should be commented at this point that reporting is a major asset of the up.time suite and we can immediately see this aspect has had a good deal of thought and time spent making the reports meaningful, and simple to create as possible. Reports can be generated in multiple formats as well as having the option to save and/or email to a single user or a group.
Use Cases
Some of the key use cases for implementing the up.time suite are:
- Within multi-platform environments where it can be costly or complex to run multiple or distributed monitoring systems
- Merger and acquisition of discrete or independent IT environments creates a requirement to build a cohesive enterprise solution
- Where an organisation is hitting limitations of lesser monitoring suites but does not have the requirement or capital to invest in one of the ‘Big 4’ enterprise monitoring solutions.
Key Benefits
- Manage, measure and monitor locally or globally through a single console
- Ensure global Quality of Service
- Enable proactive rather than reactive IT management
- Direct and immediate cost savings of between 35% - 70%
- Exceptional user experience and self-guiding interface
Conclusion
We have only touched upon parts of this comprehensive product but suffice to say that it is a highly flexible and scalable real-time solution from which local or global datacentres can be monitored at any level.
Aggregation through enterprise monitoring systems not only reduces software overhead and license costs but provides a single point of reference and the opportunity to implement numerous task automation processes.
We see a lot of products and are frequently asked to comment about user experience. In this case we’d have to say this is one of the best user interfaces for a multi-facted product we’ve seen – every step has great pointers to minimise administrative effort.
Finally, being able to intelligently link events to SLA’s is one of up.time key plays, and together with a number of other features normally only seen in one of the ‘Big 4’ branded enterprise solutions, we feel this product is batting well above its station.
About up.time
up.time delivers deep server monitoring for mid-enterprises, without the complexity or high cost of enterprise tools by simplifying the management of virtual and physical resources with a single tool. up.time also helps solve difficult virtualization challenges, including identifying virtualization candidates, optimizing VM density and ensuring end-user performance. Additionally, up.time helps IT departments get proactive, with outage avoidance and automated healing capabilities.
up.time offers a fully functional free trial version that can be installed and running in less than 15 minutes. Download the up.time 30-day trial here
About uptime software
uptime software inc. is a privately held corporation founded in 2001 and headquartered in Toronto, Canada. With over 700 clients in 32 countries, uptime is a premier provider of systems management software for virtual server monitoring and physical server monitoring, capacity planning, and service and application monitoring. Visit us online at www.uptimesoftware.com.
Useful links
http://www.uptimesoftware.com Up.Time website
http://www.uptimesoftware.com/register_standard.php Register for the download
http://www.uptimesoftware.com/case-studies.php Case Studies
http://www.uptimesoftware.com/WP-ROICalculator.php ROI calculator
http://www.uptimesoftware.com/server-monitoring-review.php Other reviews
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