Agentless Monitoring Advances: Event Correlation

Most monitoring software reports system and application events in isolation, revealing little to nothing about the impact on your business. With event correlation, related events across one or more monitored components trigger intelligent alerts and actions, so you immediately understand the business impact.

How can you benefit from event correlation? Here are some practical ways to apply event correlation with Longitude V3:

Fewer, More Meaningful Events

Correlated events can create higher level, more meaningful events based on associations or correlations in a set of seemingly unrelated lower level events. For example, a time-out on a URL query on your web server, coupled with low free memory on your database server, can trigger a correlated event that indicates that a customer-facing web application is unresponsive due to a memory shortage on the database server.

Customization to Your Unique Applications & Infrastructure

Correlated events can translate a native event into an equivalent event that is customized to your infrastructure. For example, an event that indicates that a router is unreachable can trigger a correlated event indicating that the ERP application is unavailable because the router is down, and notify the affected personnel.

Specific Resolution Instructions

Correlated events can create help text and remedy information specific to your organization and its response to problems. For example, the same event that detects a problem in the router for the ERP application can trigger a correlated event that describes how to find, diagnose and repair that particular network router, and even what number to call if manufacturer support is required.

What to Look For

Evaluating monitoring software? Be sure to look for these event correlation features:

• Flexibility in specifying events: the UI should enable you to select events based on specific event identification (e.g., "unable to ping server X"), event class / severity (e.g., "all critical Oracle events"), etc., and should enable you to correlate events across computers and platforms.
• Timing: you should be able to specify how many times an event has to occur and also how close in time events need to occur in order to be correlated (e.g., "must happen 3 times within 30 minutes).
• Occurrence logic: you should be able to specify events that do NOT occur as well as events that occur (e.g., "event A AND event B," "event A OR event B," "event A and NOT event B").
• Customizing text: you should be able to customize event text and specify what real time data to insert (e.g., which disk is low on space, how low it is, etc.).

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