Monitoring-as-a-service for infrastructures on the example of the Anturis service

Monitoring is one of the integral components of the management of IT infrastructures. Today there are many solutions and approaches to monitoring, the most popular of them can be divided into two groups:

• Only external monitoring , which is used to analyze the situation on the part of users. In this case, such metrics as Response Time, Uptime, Round-trip Time, etc. look. The leader in this segment is the Swedish Pingdom , although there are many analogues (including free ones), as well as services specializing in certain regions. The disadvantage of such solutions is that if there is an understanding of the problem, it is difficult to identify its cause and, accordingly, to quickly resolve it.
• Open-source monitoring systems such as Nagios or Zabbix . This approach is primarily popular with a high degree of customization and almost limitless functionality that can be expanded with the help of handwritten scripts and third-party plug-ins. At the same time, such systems require a lot of time for training in the implementation and support of the components of the monitoring itself. In addition, some external monitoring functionality is lost (for example, checks from different geographic locations).

Monitoring-as-a-service

There are many IT specialists who clearly lack only external monitoring, and they are not ready to spend most of their time and money on deploying and maintaining their own monitoring system. Therefore, in the past few years, a new class of solutions has appeared on the market - monitoring-as-a-service or hosted monitoring.

In this case, internal resources (hardware and software, network resources) are monitored mainly with the help of local agents, and external (third-party and own services, synthetic transactions, etc.) using queries from vendor servers. Data is collected on the service side, after which error reports and reports are generated and notifications are sent in case of problems.
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In short, the advantages of hosted monitoring are:

• Minimizing the cost of training with the system
• Minimize the cost of deploying and maintaining a monitoring system
• Simple scaling
• Advanced features for external monitoring

Anturis service

One of these services is Anturis . Schematically, the principle of its operation can be represented as follows (the arrows show the dependencies between the components, and the dotted line is the collection and transmission of data):



With this approach, impact-dependencies modeling between the end user experience (EUE) and infrastructure components is tracked, which allows you to quickly identify the causes of problems.

Creation of new monitors takes place through the web GUI, for this it is enough to go through the corresponding wizard (and in the case of internal monitoring, install the agent in advance):



At the moment, Anturis allows you to create the following types of monitors:



The main features of the service include:

• Monitoring of hardware and software servers;
• Web services monitoring;
• Monitoring the loading of web pages (imitation of a full page load by the browser);
• Monitoring synthetic transactions;
• External monitoring from different geographical locations;
• Network monitoring (SNMP, quality of channels, printers);
• Notification of problems via SMS, phone call or email;
• Plug-ins for cPanel and Parallels Plesk;
• Creating periodic reports and data visualization;
• Incident analysis.

You can try Anturis yourself, using the free version for 30 days. To do this, simply create an account on the site Anturis .

Future partnership options

At the moment we are considering the possibility of working together with Anturis, the following options are possible:

• The service will be offered under the Infobox brand, retaining all the capabilities of the platform and technological updates.
• Integration through Parallels Automation. With this option, the trial version and subscription to the service can be purchased through the store directly in the Plesk panel. In addition, setting up Plesk resource monitoring is possible using auto discovery (details and video here).
• Selling licenses through the Infobox.

Need your opinion

Write in the comments:

• Are you interested in monitoring-as-a-service in general?
• What monitoring solutions do you use now?
• If you used the free version of Anturis, what are your impressions? What do you like and not? What is missing?
• Are you interested in this product as an Infobox partner and in what capacity (see the previous part)?
• Is Russification important in this case for you?

If you can not leave comments on Habré, write in the InfoboxCloud Community .