HP Software: Application Monitoring Systems

Recall the early two thousandths: the IT world already knows and without fear of using the terms ITIL, IT processes, automation, a complex system, etc., and the expression “Monitoring and Management System” is a rather simple and concise concept associated with a couple three simple tasks and systems.

Ten years have passed and the expression “Monitoring and Management System” no longer contains all the variety of tasks and concepts that are invested in it, and at the same time also began to “rub off” the language of IT specialists, consultants and vendors who carry a luminous Value in IT masses.

Today, we propose to engage in the analysis of the concept of "system of monitoring and management." We distinguish three types that most often appear as separate entities:
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Type number 1 - "Bridge" . (Synonyms: "Umbrella system", "Manager of managers").
May be useful for companies moving from infrastructure monitoring.
It is important that investments in existing systems (well performing the tasks of monitoring individual parts of the infrastructure) are utilized, and the systems themselves become information agents.

What can be a prerequisite for the implementation of the “Bridge” system:
• IT decided to consolidate disparate monitoring systems not able to show the whole picture.
• Serious application failure was not diagnosed using infrastructure monitoring (although every single element was “green”)
• Too many warnings / alarms, lack of uniform coverage, prioritization, and causal identification.

Implementation Results
Automated collection of all available events and IT infrastructure metrics -> mapping (correlation) of states and their effect on service health -> root cause search -> Mapping for the dashboard operator highlighting the root cause of the failure with recommendations for eliminating it. Or in the case of a typical failure, you can go ahead and assign a script that automates the necessary actions of the operator.

Type number 2 - "Analyst anomalies"
Imagine that, as in the first case, we collect events and metrics from a number of infrastructure monitoring systems, we even went further and set up a collection of logs (not only IT, but also security). Every minute we have a lot of information and we want as soon as possible to get the benefits of its disposal.

What can be a prerequisite for the implementation of the “Analytics of anomalies” system:
• It is difficult to keep up with everything new in the company's IT environments, but there is a need to collect, store and analyze all data
• The need to reactively fix unknown problems.
• It is impossible to easily identify information that is important for troubleshooting.
• Searching for individual journals throughout your IT environment requires considerable manual effort.
• Define deviations and recurring failures.

Implementation Results
Automated collection of events, metrics, logs -> storing this information for a necessary period of time -> analysis of any information, including logs, performance data and system data -> prediction and resolution of any types of problems, known and unknown. As well as the possibility of prevention for known failures.

Type 3 - "Application Performance Management" (identifying and eliminating failures in end-user transactions)
This type of solution can be a useful addition, working in close contact with the previous two. But its beauty is that in itself, it can also give a quick result from the introduction.

We presume that the company has important business applications. Business cares about the availability and quality of services, one of the key elements of which is the application (for example: Internet banking, CRM, billing ...).
Business is very nervous if the availability or quality of this service is degraded. And the worst thing is that business will know about this problem within 10 minutes after its appearance, which greatly upsets IT staff.

The notions of “proactivity” and “fast recovery” immediately begin to creep into IT.

What can be a prerequisite for the introduction of such a system:
• It is necessary to increase the availability of application services and performance, as well as reduce the average recovery time
• Business talks about “protecting profits” (preventing customers from leaving)
• Eliminate unnecessary costs and reduce risks associated with a service level agreement (SLA)

The results of the implementation may vary depending on the main task, but in general it is:
performance of typical user actions by a “robot” from different regions \ network segments + analysis of “mirrored” traffic -> checking availability and quality of services with identification of “bottlenecks” -> informing the operator about the need to recover, indicating the location of degradation -> if necessary deep diagnostics of the application to find the causes of systematic degradation.


Further, we offer to familiarize with the implementation of the above types of monitoring using HP Software products.

HP Software products will help solve the tasks of monitoring at all levels, ranging from monitoring the infrastructure: network equipment, servers, storage systems, right through to monitoring the quality of business services and business processes.

The evolutionary path of development allows you to solve problems in stages, gradually increasing the capabilities of the system.

In this case, you can start with the infrastructure monitoring, and with the monitoring of services.

HP Software Bridge

HP Operations Bridge introduces the latest generation of “umbrella monitoring systems”, it integrates monitoring data from its own agents, various HP Software monitoring modules and non-HP monitoring tools. The flow of events from all sources of information is superimposed on the resource-service model, correlation mechanisms are applied to it to determine which events are causes, symptoms and effects.

Separately, it is necessary to dwell on the resource-service model. From the completeness and relevance of this model depends on the ability of the decision to perform a correlation of the flow of events. To maintain the relevance of the models, intelligence tools are used based on agents and agentless technologies, which allow to obtain detailed information about the components of the service, the relationships between them and the mutual influence. There is also the ability to import data on the topology of the service from external sources - monitoring systems.

Another important aspect is ease of operation. In complex and rapidly changing environments, it is important to ensure the adjustment of the monitoring system when changing the structure of systems, adding new services. The Operations Bridge includes the Monitoring Automation component, which allows you to automatically configure systems that are reintroduced into the monitoring perimeter, for which data on service-resource models are used. At the same time, configuration and modification of monitoring settings that have already been performed are supported. Previously, administrators could perform the same settings of similar infrastructure components (for example, metrics on Windows or UNIX servers), which required considerable time and effort, then now you can dynamically and centrally adjust thresholds for a metric in the context of a service or a service.


HP Software Application Analytics

Using the traditional approach to monitoring implies that we know what to look for:
• what parameters to control
• which events to track
The growing complexity and dynamics of the development of IT systems makes it necessary to look for other approaches, as it becomes increasingly difficult to control all aspects of the system. What to do when something unexpected happens?

Operations analytics allows you to collect and save all data about the application's operation: log files, telemetry, business and performance metrics, system events, etc. and use analytical tools to identify trends and predict. HP OA brings the collected data to a single format and then, making a contextual selection, based on the data of the log-files, displays on the timeline what happened at what time and on which system.

HP OA provides several forms of data visualization (for example, an interactive “heat map” and the topology of log file interrelationships) and uses the helper function to find the entire set of data collected for a specific period in the context of an event or a query entered in the search bar. This helps the operator to understand what led to the failure (or — when using HP SHA data together with HP OA data — to make an appropriate prediction), and also to identify both the culprit and the root cause of the failure that occurred. HP OA allows you to reproduce the picture of the service and the environment at the time of failure and isolate it in context and time.

Another analytic tool is the HP Service Health Analyzer . HP SHA provides detection of abnormal behavior of controlled elements of the infrastructure in order to prevent possible denial of service or violation of the specified parameters of their provision. The product uses special algorithms for statistical data analysis based on the HP BSM topological service-resource model. With their help, it is possible to build a profile of normal values ​​of performance parameters collected from both software and hardware platforms and from other BSM modules (for example, HP RUM, HP BPM), characterizing the state of services. Typical parameter values ​​are entered into such profiles, taking into account the days of the week and the time of day. SHA performs historical analysis of the accumulated data and statistical analysis (to understand the essence of the identified data), and in addition carries out a comparison with the existing dynamic profile (baselining),

HP Software Application Performance Monitoring

When it comes to monitoring application performance, the following components of the HP solution should be highlighted:
- HP Real User Monitoring (HP RUM) —monitor control of real users transactions
- HP Business Process Monitoring (HP BPM) - application availability control by emulating user actions
- HP Diagnostics - control the passage of requests within the application

HP RUM and HP BPM make it possible to assess application availability from the end user's point of view.

HP RUM parses network traffic, revealing real user transactions. In this case, you can control the exchange of data between application components: the client part — the application server — the database. This makes it possible to track user activity, the processing time of various transactions, to determine the relationship between user activity and business metrics.

Using HP RUM, monitoring service operators will not only be able to instantly receive operational notifications about problems with the availability of services, but also information about errors encountered by users.

HP BPM is an active monitoring tool, HP BPM performs synthetic user transactions that are indistinguishable from real ones for monitored systems.

HP BPM monitoring data is very convenient to use for calculating the real SLA, since the “robot” performs the same checks at the same time intervals, ensuring continuous quality control of typical (or most critical) requests.

By setting up samples to perform synthetic transactions from several points, for example, from different offices of the company, you can also evaluate the availability of the service for different users, taking into account their location, the communication channels used.

To emulate HP BPM activity, it uses the Virtual User Generator (VuGen) tool, which is also used in the popular HP LoadRunner load testing tool. VuGen supports a huge range of different protocols and technologies, so you can control the availability of virtually any service, as well as use a single set of scripts for testing and monitoring.

HP Diagnostics . How to be when the causes of failures or deceleration of the service is inside the application, such technologies as Java,.

HP Diagnostics provides deep control of Java, .NET, Python applications on Windows, Linux and Unix platforms, supports a variety of application servers (Tomcat, Jboss, WebLogic, Oracle, etc.), MiddleWare and databases. Specialized HP Diagnostics agents are installed on application servers and collect technology-specific data. For example, for a Java application, you can see which requests are being executed, which methods are used, and how much time is spent on processing them.

The structure of the application is automatically drawn, it becomes clear how its components are involved. HP Diagnostics allows you to track the passage of business transactions within complex applications, identify bottlenecks and provide experts with the necessary information for making decisions.

Related Links:
Presentation of HP Gelion
What is the network technology SDN - Software Defined Networking

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