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July Issue of the Taos Newsletter: Systems Management and Remote Management
Systems and Remote Management Solutions Can Be Tailored to Fit Varying Needs
Taos Professional Services Team
During the course of our 15+ year history, Taos consultants have been called upon by customers to design, build, and implement a variety of remote monitoring and management solutions, tailored to address a variety of objectives. Some solutions have included one or more pre-built, industry-standard tools such as HP OpenView, Cisco Works, MRTG, NetSaint/Nagios, Big Brother, and Tivoli. Others have been built around customized applications, sometimes completely from scratch, to meet very specific needs. Sometimes, a combination of methods has been employed, mixing industry-standard tools with local customizations. Here are some examples of how Taos consultants, through their experience and expertise in the area of systems and remote management, have helped customers achieve their goals.
Commercial and open source solutions combine to improve effectiveness and response time
For our first example, a communications company needed to monitor both their local area network and numerous WAN connections to remote sites in order to respond quickly to issues and increase network reliability. With 30 frame-relay connections in total, each serving a discrete IP network, the client wanted a system that would automatically alert the members of their IT department when one of the links went down, or when one of the servers was having issues. To address this need, Taos recommended and installed HP OpenView as the primary monitoring tool. This “off-the-shelf” solution was chosen because it provided the real-time network map required. An additional benefit was that it provided a choice of interfaces for different client needs - a fast UNIX X11-based GUI for the IT Staff or a more portable, web-based interface for the non-UNIX based management clients.
In addition to the OpenView implementation, several open-source tools were used to complete the system requirements. These included “Scotty,” an X11-based GUI tool written in TCL, capable of real-time bandwidth usage monitoring, and “Cricket,” which is similar to MRTG. Cricket produces graphs of specified variables over time, including network utilization, server statistics, and other attributes. The end result was a system that provided automatic alerts and helped the customer achieve their goal of improving the effectiveness and response time of their IT organization. In addition, it provided the systems data and reports needed on an ongoing basis to help them continually improve their network and server utilization as requirements changed over time.
A completely customized solution can be lower cost and allow for more control over the design
In our second example, a Taos consultant assigned to a large computer manufacturer played a lead role in creating a completely customized monitoring solution for their IT systems. In this case, the customer wanted to avoid the software license and recurring maintenance costs associated with commercial solutions and, at the same time, have more control over the nuances of the final solution. With help from the Taos consultant, a low cost solution was tailor-made that included a wide range of requirements:
- Checking that LSF (Platform Computing) is working properly on each cluster system.
- Checking that all the important NFS mounts are accessible.
- Checking that there's enough swap space on the systems.
- Checking that each system is accessible.
- CPU Load Monitoring. For some critical systems, alerts are sent out if the load exceeds a given threshold.
- License Daemon monitoring, including alerts sent out if any of them go offline.
- Disk utilization monitoring and alerting.
Open source can provide inexpensive yet robust solutions that are easy to manage
In our third and final example, a leading Silicon Valley 150 client acquired a smaller company and required a completely new monitoring system to be built from scratch. As in the case above, this client also desired a system that would be low cost to build. Additionally, they wanted a system that would be easy to manage and maintain by providing such things as its own reporting and paging capabilities. To address this requirement, the Taos Team used a combination of Nagios, Cricket, Smokeping, Snort, standard UNIX and Windows logging tools, and some customized scripts (written in Perl and PHP). The result was a very robust and effective, yet low cost monitoring and management system that would alert the IT staff within seconds if any critical systems were to fail. Again, this solution included a wide range of capabilities:
- Monitoring network utilization
- Monitoring server resource utilization (CPU, memory, swap, disk space)
- Monitoring individual services, both through standard TCP checks and customized Nagios plug-ins that would check the individual applications’ responses to standard queries. These checks were performed for both standard services such as mail, web, and DNS, and also for non-standard services such as the developers’ Perforce server.
- Monitoring latency (via Smokeping) to critical servers, including the latency of responses from web, mail, and other TCP services running on those servers.
- Monitoring the usage patterns of network resources such as switch ports, VPN access, firewall rules, and Wireless LAN (WiFi) access.
- Monitoring intrusion detection attempts from both outside and inside (in the case of a virus infecting a local machine due to a compromised laptop being brought in from an employee’s home).
- A three-tier escalation system for sending out pages to the parties responsible for these systems when they entered a “down” or severely degraded state.
Taos has the systems and remote management experience you need
Whether you are looking to implement an “off the shelf’ solution, and open source solution, a custom solution, some combination of these, or if you’re unsure which is best, Taos has a vast wealth of technical knowledge in systems and remote management and can help you sort it out and design and implement the best solution for your needs. Our consultants have tremendous experience in this area - using a variety of commercial tools, open-source tools, and custom tools that they have either supported or programmed themselves. This technical knowledge and experience puts Taos in an excellent position to provide a quality monitoring and management system for an enterprise of any size.
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