Zoho’s Site24x7, a cloud monitoring service for DevOps and IT operations, has announced the launch of its Network Monitoring beta, which provides performance insight and optimization for network devices.
Zoho designed the Network Monitoring product based on ManageEngine’s enterprise-class network performance monitoring software, OpManager. ManageEngine is a division of Zoho. The new product provides monitoring for network components such as routers, switches and firewalls. By running a network discovery using SNMP, Network Monitoring automatically discovers network devices to monitor.
To provide better quality software and services, the DevOps methodology stresses improved collaboration and communication between development and IT operations teams as well as improved IT operations performance. However, many DevOps solutions actually impede collaboration and communication by taking a development- or IT operations-centric approach to monitoring, which forces one of the teams to adopt additional tools to meet its needs, Zoho said. Site24x7 provides balance and depth of monitoring, so both development and operations teams can collaborate around a single tool.
“By adding network monitoring to Site24x7, we deliver on the DevOps promise with one console that provides comprehensive monitoring from applications to infrastructure and end users,” said Gibu Mathew, director of product management for Site24x7, in a statement. “Site24x7 keeps development and IT operations teams in touch and on the same page, literally; so, they can focus on the performance and availability of critical applications without getting bogged down in confusing or inconsistent data—or worse—finger pointing.”
Indeed, Site24x7 provides the monitoring services that enable DevOps teams to work together to improve software development and IT operations. Site24x7 monitors Website, Web, and mobile applications; application performance; infrastructure, both server and network; and public and private clouds.
For developers, Site24x7 tracks application response times and monitors real user experience. For developers working with Java, .NET, Ruby and mobile platforms, Site24x7 can drill down into transactions to identify the root cause of performance problems in the application stack, such as the application, Web server, SQL queries, or database.
For IT operations teams, it monitors Website and Web application availability and performance, tracks the availability and performance of servers and the network infrastructure, and provides end users with availability and performance dashboards.
In other DevOps news, VictorOps, which offer a real-time incident management platform for DevOps, announced enhancements to its intelligent routing and alert annotations functionality, known as the Transmogrifier. The enhancements, which pair intelligent routing with alert annotations, help to improve the way teams solve problems and cut resolution time.
The process of intelligent routing gives teams the ability to change the state of alerts, which includes everything from cleaning up and quieting alarms during certain parts of the day to ensuring alarms are directed to specific people, and creating alarms for custom monitoring solutions or emails. With VictorOps alert annotations, real-time remediation data comes baked into the initial alert, placing all relevant facts in the hands of engineers. By surfacing an organization’s existing documentation and importing both graphs and data alongside the initial alert, VictorOps enables engineers to quickly see a path to solving problems.
“We went beyond just addressing the documentation issue and also solved for alert fatigue,” said Todd Vernon, co-founder and CEO of VictorOps, in a statement. “Improving time-to-resolution is more than just fixing documentation challenges; it’s also about addressing alerts before they escalate. Now organizations can transform how alerts behave so they can sort through the noise and get to what’s important.”
9-1-1 Labs has a distributed team with several projects running simultaneously, where finding the right documentation to aid in the triage of problems could be difficult. “Using the VictorOps Transmogrifier has saved us a phenomenal amount of work,” said Daniel Zacek, CTO of 9-1-1 Labs. “Not only is our response time substantially more efficient, VictorOps has decreased our average time-to-resolution by at least fifty percent.”
David Palma, DevOps engineer at Craftsy said, “With the Transmogrifier, I save a good 5-10 minutes of trying to search for all the necessary documentation. There is no longer stress associated with having to obtain information from disparate places, and this has been extremely beneficial for the team.”
Meanwhile, Jeremy Welch, a services engineer at Entrust, added, “By using the annotation functionally, knowledge is no longer in one person’s possession. If a problem arises, we are confident the person on-call will have all the information they need whether they’ve never seen the problem before, or they have dealt with it 100 times.”