Gibu’s Blog

Many enterprises have trouble to find out what IT resources do what in a business context. Sometimes when someone wants to know what are the servers / applications that need to be moved along with the Bank Integration software, well they will be playing bingo

They may not know, that RH Linux server1 and jboss server1 , and sql server2 are used for the online store etc.. This calls for a requirement to group your resources and manage them as a single uint. This way problems are escalated as problems for a business process or application.

Eg: there should be an alert that says watch out something wrong with the ‘online store’ right now. This would actually go to the Business Manager while an operations center personnel can also see the root cause of the problem as the SQL server slowed down due to abnormally excessive writes of huge data.

App. Manager has a Monitor Group concept that does this. Well is that an obvious term for what it does ? Not sure.

[ Mood: Cool ]
I was going through some of the pricing mechanisms of software in the Applications Management space. There are quite a few types of pricing. Well I have to say enterprises shell out out a lot for getting their software monitored.

Some of the pricing models I have come across are listed :

1) Pricing on a per monitored metric. Eg: Response time of webserver1

Here you need to spend based on the number of attributes of any server you need to monitor. Eg: you want to monitor response time and cpu usage of 2 systems, you need to pay for 2 x 2 = 4 metrics. You may be charged $xy / metric.

2) Some software charge you based on per server. You have an Oracle on a syetem and you want to monitor the oracle database, well you are charged say, $xyz / Oracle server (application).

3) Some also include the number of CPUs on the system in which the target application being monitored has. Hence if you have a webserver on a quad processor, you may be charged $xyz X 4 for monitoring just one instance of the software on this quad proc m/c.

4) Some are priced based on a server. Read that statement as per system. to be more clear, say you have an Oracle, WebLogic & webserver all installed on one Linux server. You pay per server. That’s it. You donot pay for per application on the Linux server.

5) Another software pricing model - monitor unlimited instances for a very low flat price. Well this looks very unconventional in the onset, but it looks like that’s what monitoring might be actually worth ? … maybe … Well probably it may not be worth pricing it on a monitor/server basis when the price is very low.

‘Monitor’ is a word that seems to be used differently. Some specify a monitor as a metric or attribute. Some refer an application as a monitor. Some confusion for users

Is our Free Edition really worthwhile ?

We have a Free Edition where the user can use our product and use it as long as the company has limited resources to manage and later migrate to the Professional Edition when they grow.

Updated : [The Free Edition allows you to monitor 5 monitors now.]

Your mileage can vary based on how many systems your applications are deployed on. I say this as you need to add the system also for monitoring before you add the application.

Coming back to the question : Is our Free Edition really worthwhile ? …. will leave it for comments in this blog

Open Source applications have been in the market for quite some time now, that people have started looking for monitoring tools.

We support JBoss 4 as a patch now. We have been trying to find out what other applications users really need to make our offering even more attractive. Right now its almost most of LAMP without the ‘P’. Linux , Apache (for SP1) , MySQL. Ofcourse we already have Tomcat.

For those having external blogs, you can give the link to it, as your website, in the ‘Profile’ section on the adventnet.com forums. This way, you are more linked to the outside world.

When you reply in a forum, the link to the profile can take people to your adventnet blogs

This week we have started on our hunt for some Beta Testers. Well its the ManageEngine Applications Manager product I am talking about. We’ve got some good feedback from some potential customers who have downloaded the beta version of the latest release. We would like even more

There are diverse environment out there and we want to make sure that it does not give us a nightmare ! want to ease the use of the software by the time we do our GA.

There is more info about the program on our website. http://appmanager.com

There are rewards too, (hush …hush) I think its for almost every one.

Beta of Applications Manager has been there for 2 months now. Preparations are going full fledged for GA. In the meantime, we are planing to get the Beta 2 of Applications Manager out soon. It is hectic here, what with the coming Diwali holidays and Idu l-Fitr, we’ll have a looooong weekend.

Unlike its cousin OpManager, Applications Manager provides a higher level, application-centric view of your IT systems. This complements the device and network centric views from OpManager, by tying application health to various lower level monitors. You get a summarized ‘business application’ level view, from which you can drill down to the individual resource level.

Of course, those interested in just managing their resources (say, all the WebLogic Servers or all Oracle instances etc) too can do it, the way they want it.

check out http://appmanager.com .. …

This blog will mainly cover topics related to Application Management. That’s the area I work in AdvenNet right now.

My favourite quote :

“Do to others as you would have them do to you”

St. Luke 6:31

About Me :

EMail : gibuk adventnet.com / gibukm (at) gmail d0t com

Name : Gibu K Mathew

Location : Chennai, India

Where all I blog :

Official Blogs:

1) Site24×7.com

2) Applications Manager Blogs

Personal Blog

Update: added blog links