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Organizations are adopting virtualization and cloud computing
for a variety of reasons, including: more cost-effective hardware
utilization, reduced power consumption, simpler disaster recovery,
and faster, more flexible provisioning. While this trend holds
great promise, it also leaves many IT organizations scrambling
to ensure – and document – that end users continue
to receive the expected levels of service from critical applications
once they have “gone virtual” or “moved
into the cloud.”
Heroix Longitude® Cloud Edition gives you the visibility
you need to monitor and assess the performance of anything
from a single physical or virtual entity, to a multi-tiered
application or business service that spans physical, virtual
and cloud environments. It provides this single pane of glass
by integrating three key monitoring perspectives:
- End user experience
- Key performance & infrastructure metrics
- Service levels
End User Experience
Virtualization and cloud computing have changed the longstanding
monitoring paradigm of using resource utilization to gauge
application performance. With the dynamic mapping of workloads
among underlying physical resources, the most reliable way
to measure application performance is to assess responsiveness
from the perspective of your end users. Longitude enables
you to emulate the experience of an end user by recording
web transactions of interest, and then replaying them synthetically
to assess the availability and response of the application,
as well as the content of the site.
Longitude’s End User Experience monitoring can be configured
in a matter of minutes. Begin by recording a Web transaction,
click by click, that you want to test on a recurring basis.
Specify how frequently you want the transaction to run. Longitude
will initiate the synthetic transaction as scheduled, record
response time for reporting purposes, and generate events
and notification when problems are detected.
Key Performance & Infrastructure Metrics
If the end user’s experience indicates a problem, the
next step is to drill into the virtual environment and physical
infrastructure to pinpoint the likely root cause. Longitude
provides out-of-the-box monitoring for Windows, Red Hat, SUSE,
Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and VMware. Longitude proactively monitors
key performance metrics to diagnose issues and reveal underlying
causes. Longitude also provides pre-configured, on-demand
reports and graphs of key performance metrics to help you
understand developing trends and ensure maximum availability.
Longitude also checks the availability and responsiveness
of the infrastructure components that support your critical
applications, such as:
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Service Levels
Longitude’s Service Level Agreements (SLAs) integrate
the end user experience and performance & infrastructure
metrics, to give you holistic view of how your critical applications
are functioning across physical, virtual, and cloud environments.
A Longitude SLA groups together all the disparate components
that work together to support multi-tiered applications that
underlie critical business processes, and monitors for degradations
in performance or availability of the service as a whole.
For example, suppose a mission critical application depends
on a web server in the cloud, a virtualized application server,
back end database housed on a non-virtualized server, and
network connectivity. Longitude enables you to define a service
level agreement that represents the convergence of all these
underlying operational components plus the response experienced
by the end user.
If any single component is down or operating out of acceptable
tolerance, it is reflected in the status of the overall SLA.
Longitude can then report and alert – in real time or
historically – exactly what was out of compliance, for
how long, and how severely. This helps you provide better
service in several ways:
- Eliminate finger pointing and cut resolution time –
Longitude incorporates all of the components that support
the business service and shows you exactly what is causing
the problem.
- Prevent problems and eliminate firefighting – by
allowing you to specify degraded as well as unacceptable levels
of performance for each component, Longitude can alert you
before end users are affected, and even take corrective action
if desired.
- Make IT staff better at what they do - by allowing IT staff
to drill down into underlying issues, Longitude puts actionable
information into the right hands.
- Create more meaningful management reports – Longitude
allows you to annotate SLAs with information about outages
and remedies taken to resolve issues.
About Longitude
With Longitude you get the best of both worlds –
agentless software that’s not only affordable and easy to
install and use, but gives you the kind of comprehensive
application and network performance monitoring that you’d
expect from high end agent-based software. Longitude monitors
hundreds of vital performance metrics, alerts you to problems,
takes any corrective actions you specify, and generates reports and graphs that demonstrate just how
well your operating system,
databases,
web servers,
and messaging servers are performing. Best of all, everything
is presented in dashboard views that let you drill down to
investigate problems and find answers fast.
In keeping with its robust functionality, Heroix Longitude
scales with ease. It’s equally adept at monitoring a few
servers or many. And unlike some other agentless solutions,
Longitude is totally self-contained with no prerequisites for
layered software. You won’t have to install extra software,
nor will you get stung by unexpected costs such as additional
database, report writer, and runtime license fees. In most
cases, Longitude can be deployed in about 15 minutes!
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