Monitoring from the Cloud

I have started the year 2011 out by looking at some of the different monitoring solutions available for us to have an insight into the health and welfare of the systems that we support. In your typical monitoring solution you would install the monitoring server in your environment and let the system discover all the devices in your infrastructure and/or to control the licenses we would manually enter the devices that we want to monitor. Some of these monitoring servers solutions have to have a beefy box to begin with and all solutions will need a great deal of “tweaking” to control the number of false positives as well as time put in to be able to report on what exactly we care to be alerted about.

Cloud computing has become more and more of a reality with different services and systems being run from within the cloud.  As an example you have Acronis performing backups to the cloud.  Email and other application have been migrated to the cloud and now monitoring of your environment has been moved into the cloud with LogicMonitor.

LogicMonitor is a very robust monitoring solution that can monitor all the virtual devices as well as the physical devices in your environment.   All that is needed is a host server to run a java application that will send the monitoring information to the cloud via a SSL connection. LogicMonitor has the ability to monitor and report on several different devices which include things like:

With LogicMonitor’s Cloud Computing and Virtualization Monitoring you have the ability to monitor hybrid clouds like Amazon and others as well as it being a great tool for Managed Service Providers as well and which will scale efficiently when needed.

Once something does go wrong you need the right kind of alert, at the right time, to the right people, so your issues are resolved quickly. A lot of times the administrator is flooded with meaningless multiple alerts. LogicMonitor’s alerts don’t just tell you something is wrong, it will actually give you suggestions to resolve the problem.

LogicMonitor takes advantage of automation during the discovery of a device so no special steps are needed when adding a device.  Simply enter the hostname of the device and the ActiveDiscovery will take care of the rest by discovering and identifying the device.  With data collection by WMI, SNMP, JDBC, JMX, HTTP page contents, custom scripts, Perf Mon counters, and various platform specific APIs, and the ability to parse the output of arbitrary scripts, there are lots of ways to get data in to LogicMonitor.

LogicMonitor will take that information to automatically create dynamic graphs that update automatically and provide at-a-glance information about any performance issues in the environment.

All in all I think the migration of monitoring as a SaaS shows as a prime example of the power and flexibility cloud computing brings to the table and I think we will be seeing more and more services offered on the cloud.

I would love to see a mobile friendly version available.  LogicMonitor uses Flash to create the graphs and Apple does not play with Flash at all. LogicMonitor will work on devices by creating a static image for the graphs themselves.  This is not totally ideal but all the main functionality is still there and works on all devices.