Although some IT shops find it hard to justify and get the funding to implement one monitoring and management tool for systems and applications, some high-transaction volume shops require redundant monitoring systems.
To meet the requirements of those very large shops, eG Innovations is preparing to launch a new eG Redundant Manager Cluster.
The new offering automates failover and recovery to backup monitoring servers combined in a cluster.
The eG Suite of monitoring products provides monitoring and management of some 75 different applications as well as the top five operating systems and top five databases.
“Our redundancy in large accounts has become quite critical. Where in a lot of accounts you can live two or three hours if a monitoring system goes down, its not true for high-volume transactions,” said Tim Clark, vice president of marketing for the company in Iselin, N.J.
The eG Redundant Manager Cluster allows multiple eG management servers to be grouped in a cluster.
They can be configured to all be active to distribute the monitoring load across multiple servers.
Java-based agents dynamically discover the redundant cluster configuration.
If one management server in the cluster fails, the agents automatically start reporting to one of the other managers in the cluster.
Once a failed server is brought back online, the agents see the change in status and begin reporting back to their originally assigned server.
Although the servers are not dependent on each other, all the performance and operational metrics received by each one are stored and replicated in the other servers in the cluster.
Such redundancy reduces the amount of data lost when failures occur and enables each server to operate as an active stand-by for the other servers in the cluster.
“It also allows us to scale. We can have x number of agents reporting to system A, x number of agents reporting to system B,” added Clark.
The eG Suite was originally designed to address some of the “shortcomings” of well-known monitoring and management products, including the long implementation time and expertise required to operate the tools and cost, according to Clark.
eG Innovations also focused on providing more complete monitoring of specific application environments, such as Citrix, and on Web services.
“It takes under two minutes to install an agent if you know how. The first agent will walk you through it—like where to type the IP address and permissions. You can push the agents out with software distribution [tools], but you still need to tell it what hosts to report to. The manager pushes information out to the agent on the knowledge modules it needs, and agents can be upgraded automatically,” Clark said.
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The suite also automates the task of setting thresholds, and it does baselining by time of day.
“Every hour it sets new thresholds for a particular metric and keeps thresholds for 17 days before it readjusts them,” said Clark.
The new eG Redundant Manager Cluster version is available now for $7,995 for each management console or server.
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