Monitoring for Success

Suresh Kumar Ramasamy

Do you know if your end-users are happy?

(In the context of users of Applications (desktop, web or cloud-based), Services, Servers and components of IT environment, directly or indirectly.)

The question may sound trivial, but it has a significant impact on the success of a company. The user experience is a journey, from the time they use the application or service, till after they complete the interaction. Experience can be determined based on factors like Speed, Performance, Flawlessness, Ease of use, Security, Resolution time, among others. Hence, monitoring the ‘Wow’ & ‘Woe’ moments of the users is vital. Monitor is a component of GAVS’ AIOps Platform, Zero Incident Framework^TM (ZIF).One of the key objectives of the Monitor platform is to measure and improve end-user experience. This component monitors all the layers (includes but not limited to application, database, server, APIs, end-points, and network devices) in real-time that are involved in the user experience. Ultimately, this helps to drive the environment towards Zero Incidents.

Key Features of ZIF Monitor are,

• Unified solution for all IT environment monitoring needs: The platform covers the end-to-end monitoring of an IT landscape. The key focus is to ensure all verticals of IT are brought under thorough monitoring. The deeper the monitoring, the closer an organization is to attaining a Zero Incident Enterprise^TM.

• Agents with self-intelligence: The intelligent agents capture various health parameters about the environment. When the target environment is already running under low resource, the agent will not task it with more load. It will collect the health-related metrics and communicate through the telemetry channel efficiently and effectively. The intelligence is applied in terms of parameters to be collected, the period of collection and many more.

• Depth of monitoring: The core strength of Monitor is it comes with a list of performance counters which are defined by SMEs across all layers of the IT environment. This is a key differentiator; the monitoring parameters can be dynamically configured for the target environment. Parameters can be added or removed on a need basis.

• Agent & Agentless (Remote): The customers can choose from Agent & Agentless options for the solutions. The remote solution is called as Centralized Remote Monitoring Solution (CRMS). Each monitoring parameter can be remotely controlled and defined from the CRMS. Even the agents that are running in the target environment can be controlled from the server console.

• Compliance: Plays a key role in terms of the compliance of the environment. Compliance ranges from ensuring the availability of necessary services and processes in the target environment and defines the standard of what Application, Make, Version, Provider, Size, etc. that are allowed in the target environment.

• Auto discovery: Monitor can auto-discover the newer elements (servers, endpoints, databases, devices, etc.) that are getting added to the environment. It can automatically add those newer elements into the purview of monitoring.

• Auto scale: Centralized Remote Monitoring Solution (CRMS) can auto-scale on its own when newer elements are added for monitoring through auto-discovery. The auto scale includes various aspects, like load on channel, load on individual polling engine, and load on each agentless solution.

• Real-time user & Synthetic Monitoring: Real-time user monitoring is to monitor the environment when the user is active. Synthetic monitoring is through simulated techniques. It doesn’t wait for the user to make a transaction or use the system. Instead, it simulates the scenario and provides insights to make decision proactively.

• Availability & status of devices connected: Monitor also includes the monitoring of availability and control of USB and COM port devices that are connected.

• Black box monitoring: It is not always possible to instrument the application to get insights. Hence, the Black Box technique is used. Here the application is treated as a black box and it is monitored in terms of its interaction with the Kernel & OS through performance counters.

High level overview of Monitor’s components,

• Agents, Agentless: These are the means through which monitoring is done at the target environment, like user devices, servers, network devices, load balancers, virtualized environment, API layers, databases, replications, storage devices, etc.
• ZIF Telemetry Channel: The performance telemetry that is collected from source to target is passed through this channel to the big data platform.
• Telemetry Data: Refers to the performance data and other metrics collected from all over the environment.
• Telemetry Database: This is the big data platform, in which the telemetry data from all sources are captured and stored.
• Intelligence Engine: This parses the telemetry data in near real time and raises notifications based on rule-based threshold and as well as through dynamic threshold.
• Dashboard & Alerting Mechanism: These are the means through which the results of monitoring are conveyed as metrics in dashboard and as well as notifications.
• Integration with Analyze, Predict & Remediate components: Monitoring module communicates the telemetry to Analyze & Predict components of the ZIF platform for it to use the data for analysis and apply Machine Learning for prediction. Both Monitor & Predict components, communicate with Remediate platform to trigger remediation.

The Monitor component works in tandem with Analyze, Predict and Remediate components of the ZIF platform to achieve an incident-free IT environment. Implementation of ZIF is the right step to driving an enterprise towards Zero Incidents. ZIF is the only platform in the industry that comes from the single product platform owner who owns the end-to-end IP of the solution with products developed from scratch.

For more detailed information on GAVS’ Monitor, or to request a demo please visit https://zif.ai/products/monitor/