Availability Management: Monitoring Tools and Reports

[kreases]

My company is just trying to introduce Availability Management and it seems finding tools that will monitor unavailability of servers and applications reliably and also give you reporting tools that can be used for key performance indicators is difficult.

Consequently we use about 5 different tools and still have to key information into a spreadsheet so that we can create reports.

As you can imagine this is all very time consuming, I would be interested to know how other companies manage to achieve all this.

[RandyASteinberg]

Don't forget more creative options such as the following:

Develop dummy transactions that traverse the service you are trying to monitor. This can drop checkpoints into logs at key points of the transaction, or simply when the transaction has traversed the service. If the transaction fails to traverse within a specified amount of time, an alert can be created that indicates some part of the service is no longer available.

This approach is sometimes much easier than trying to align multiple tools. The tools can be used as aids to isolate faults when they do happen. If you are dropping log checkpoints at key parts of the service/transaction, you could very quickly isolate where the fault lies.

Just some thoughts - good luck!

RandyASteinberg@aol.com

[MartinW]

Is it a large organisation you work for?

Martin...