Page II: Many organisations are considering the replacement of entrenched Unix monitoring tools with newer technologies but what evaluation criteria should be used?
Although previous experience is an important aspect to consider, the quality and the maturity of some agents have improved during the past five years. Therefore, considering implementation of a good agent is not something to be immediately ruled out. However, if data requirements are light for certain Unix systems, and no connectivity or security concerns are raised, agentless approaches will be the smart choice.
Modern monitoring-agent features
As with any maturing product, we expect additional features to be added over time to try to differentiate one technology from another and to attempt to offer better value to the user. The Unix monitoring agent should be looked on no differently.
Previously, the value of Unix agents was tied to the level of detailed data it could produce from a server and from applications. This is no longer the case. In this day and age, server and application data have become increasingly commoditised, and the agent's feature set becomes the real differentiator. The following five collection features should be expected of modern Unix monitoring agents:
Do you see what I see?
The representation of Unix server and application data has commonly been through simple component-level references. One might have an icon representing a server, and when drilling down into that server, see all the system and application components that comprise that single device.
In a simple world, this would be adequate. With current more complex infrastructures, it is not. Modern Unix monitoring tools must have a means through which to represent not just individual servers and their components, but also the relationships that exist between such servers/applications and other servers/application within the environment.
Providing this type of interface often requires the creation of a technology relationship map on a simplistic level that can help monitoring operators graphically view the environment and be able to quickly discern where problems have occurred. The other purpose of this type of mapping is to give operators an intuitive view of the infrastructure to understand where a single problem may be causing additional outages. Without this type of view, operators are stuck viewing not-so-useful component-level details.
It is not the data but what to do with it
With the maturity levels in current tools, it is not surprising to see that most Unix monitoring agents can collect roughly the same type and amount of data out of servers and applications. The data in and of itself is no longer a secret sauce and a source of added value, but rather is more of a commoditised condiment.
The real value of all the data collected by Unix monitoring agents now lies in what can be done with the data collected.
Having performance-monitoring data in a meaningful format for analysis after doing preliminary comparisons to alert thresholds has now become of paramount importance. Maturing ITOs are considering being able to perform more capable capacity planning and trend analysis without having to collect data multiple times in multiple places. With this in mind, it is critical that data collected from Unix agents be reusable for other reporting purposes, and the structure and the portability of this data for other reporting needs be clearly addressed.
Unix monitoring tools that do not do a good job of providing collected performance data in a reusable fashion should be viewed as tactical solutions only, and longer-term strategic products should be sought.
Business impact: Implementing modern Unix monitoring tools will help ITOs better align their activities to those of the business.
Bottom line: ITOs considering evaluating Unix monitoring tools should not settle for aging technology feature sets. Unix tools that map to the business, provide modern feature sets, and offer meaningful performance data output should be expected as the norm.
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