Agents collection of metrics from servers are the life blood of any tightly control environment.
The question is how many? A HP agent for openview, a Tivoli agent monitoring, a BMC agent for capacity collection, a Cirba agent for consolidation efforts....and on and on. And an agent can cost from $40 to $500 to buy and they you have to pay 20% on top of that for annual maintenance. Take that over a 4000 server environment and push the total cost out over the life of the equipment and you are into the many of millions of dollars.
Personally, I like agentless collection by snmp as its fast to implement and gathers 90% of the required metrics. Examples are MOM, SMS, BMC, Uptime, Quest and my favourite open source is Cacti and Ganglia. It will not deep dive into database filesystem utilization but it will give you the base line metrics and allow you to fix identify elevated baseline cpu's and excessive cpu queues or memory issues.
On a new site, do both. Talk the talk about agents and get the budget lined up for the next years spend and do the agentless to show results. Your buddies are the Operating System teams that should be the owners of the results and will help you with getting it going. Take there support and praise them for their efforts with the Executive and let them use it for their own uses.
Most collections allow you to group servers by applications owners or by infrastructure components. One group for all E-Messaging servers, one group for all servers on a particular SAN array, one group for all servers on a particular vlan.....all these help you to be a leader when a big issue occurs.
Big plus for agentless is most of it is 1 to 15 minutes delayed and will give you that near real time view of the environment. For the core Capacity Planners, harvest the data daily, put it into SAS and graph, trend or model away.
Regards.
Scott Wardley
No comments:
Post a Comment