Fine-tune Infrastructure Monitoring for Better Results

by Nov 7, 2019

Knowing what is going on in an enterprise’s computing environment’s infrastructure is important for several reasons. The most obvious one is to maintain visibility into the status of the various components that form the foundation of a company’s IT resources.

It’s the basic function of a monitoring tool and it is vital to provide timely and informative data regarding problems that may impact the organization’s ability to keep performance at acceptable levels. Without a viable monitoring strategy, it is impossible to quickly identify the issues that are dragging your systems down.

Another use of the information that can be obtained through monitoring is for capacity planning. A quality monitoring application will enable users to save and analyze historical data regarding different aspects of their environment.

The analysis can identify areas that are prone to bottlenecks or slowdowns caused by inadequate or poorly provisioned capacity. Addressing these issues before they can impact the user community is a valuable utilization of monitoring software.

IDERA’s Uptime Infrastructure Monitor is a comprehensive monitoring tool for infrastructure monitoring. It enables all aspects of a computing environment to be observed through a unified platform that can easily be customized to satisfy an organization’s requirements.

It can monitor an enterprise’s diversified resources spread out over multiple physical locations and cloud providers. The program captures the important details of the servers, applications, and network components that power a company’s computing assets.

In addition to serving as an excellent monitoring platform, Uptime also furnishes the ability to perform capacity planning and forecasting. It features a forensic reporting capacity that uses historical information to identify why capacity issues arose in the past so they can be avoided going forward.

Uptime also works as an SLA manager that will assist an organization meet their service level requirements to eliminate penalties and foster better customer relationships. The tool even provides the capacity to test SLAs before committing to them.

Adding Functionality to Uptime

No blueprint exists for a standardized modern computing environment. The diversity of hardware and software components results in an almost endless variety of configurations that can be implemented to provide customized solutions. Addressing every angle and potentiality is impossible when developing a software monitoring application such as Uptime.

There may be times when even such a versatile and flexible tool can use a little extra functionality to solve a particular issue or provide monitoring in a certain format. Fortunately, Uptime can be customized through the use of extensions to give users additional or more focused information on specific aspects of their infrastructure.

There are many plugins and gadgets available for Uptime that extend the tool in a variety of ways. They address a wide range of situations that may need to be monitored in a given infrastructure. Currently, there are over 80 plugins and gadgets that can be added to Uptime.

Depending on the version in use, they are managed through Plugin Manager (V7.2 and earlier) or Extension Manager (V7.3 and later).

Here are a few of the extensions that can be deployed to extend the functionality of Uptime to address the specific concerns and requirements of any computing environment.

  • Rotating dashboards gadget – No agents are required to run this gadget which automatically rotates through all desired Uptime pages. It streamlines the process of observing multiple dashboards without the need for manual intervention.
  • AIX Errpt scanner – Scan AIX Errpt logs for errors based on variables such as error ID, type or class. It requires an AIX agent and Perl to be installed on the monitoring station.
  • Advanced Windows service check – Use this plugin to check the status of Windows services across the environment. Filter the results by the service name, status, and startup type to provide the exact details desired.
  • Metric chart gadget – Easily create graphs from metrics collected by Uptime with a few clicks using this extension. Select the metric, element, and monitor instance to be used and develop visualizations based on a designated time frame or refresh interval.
  • Topology tree – This gadget displays the health of an infrastructure’s core topology with the ability to view the entire topology or focus on specific segments.

These are just a few of the extensions that can be installed to provide more functionality to what is already a versatile and customizable tool. Taking advantage of the available extensions make Uptime an even more valuable tool for keeping tabs on your infrastructure.