New Features in ehealth Release 5.7

Transcription

1 Focus on Value New Features in ehealth Release 5.7 As your business grows, managing the network that supports it should require less, not more oversight. Concord s ehealth Suite 5.7 delivers enhanced application management features, enabling you to better manage mission critical IT applications across a wide range of platforms and network architectures. Highlighted by a pair of key enhancements to Concord s Business Service Console (BSC) and Service Availability (SA), ehealth 5.7 enables you to achieve real-time end-to-end visibility and control over your applications, systems and network. Concord s Business Service Console gives you an aggregate status of critical IT services, quickly showing underperforming services, who is working to address the problem, and how long it has been a problem. In Release 5.7 new BSC features include the ability to create Service Notes for an application, explaining why a service is failing and identifying resources tasked to its resolution. An additional enhancement expanded application hierarchy provides IT staff with the ability to determine which portion of an application is causing performance to degrade and whether actual users are being affected. This release also introduces significant improvements to Service Availability with enhanced ease of use, tighter integration with Live Health and more robust testing coverage. SA enables you to quickly determine the problem that caused the application to be unavailable. This document summarizes the significant changes in ehealth Release 5.7. You ll not only discover current best practices, but also a more intuitive, integrated approach to managing your entire business service from one end of your infrastructure to the other. Key Changes in ehealth Release 5.7 include: The BSC Service Note to track business service performance and problem resolution more effectively Centralized management of Service Availability tests from one ehealth system you can create and manage SA tests for all SA test systems Support for Java applications and applets in ehealth Application Response Improved connectivity between Live Health and Service Availability Expanded platform support for SystemEDGE including Windows 2003, Digital UNIX, Red Hat Linux and HP Itanium Updated AIM for Microsoft Exchange 2003 Automated system sizing with ehealth Sizing Wizard MN-NEWFEA-004

2 The Business Service Console (BSC) For business service professionals who are responsible for maintaining the availability of business-critical applications, there is no substitution for visibility. If response times are slow or availability is sporadic, profitability and productivity suffer. To stay informed about the status of your business resources you need Concord s Business Service Console, a premier line-of-sight solution incorporated into a high-end digital dashboard. The BSC provides business managers with realtime visibility into the availability and performance of their mission-critical services. Its integrated view of applications, systems, and networks offers unprecedented visibility into workflow and, with its robust drill-down features, the ability to determine where a degradation in performance has occurred and by whom it is being addressed. A versatile solution, you can customize the BSC to focus on specific locations, organizations or business services and applications that are of particular interest. How you sort and filter the data is entirely up to you. You can, for example, group application or business services by specific locations, enabling you to determine which sites are affected by a slowdown in performance and which are not. If problems arise, you can drill down to determine which specific locations or business services and applications are impacted and identify who is responsible for resolving them. Business Managers can assess the availability and response time of critical business services by viewing simple, high-level indicators, showing green (all is well), yellow (warning, some degradation) or red (services are down, users are impacted). By left-clicking a status light you can access a Detail window to show the severity of the problems and whether anyone is aware of them. You can also drill down to Live Exceptions and display additional alarm data. The BSC includes a scrolling ticker to show status for groups that you are monitoring. The ticker updates continuously. You can choose to focus your view on a particular problem (availability, response, failure, or delay) or, to review the latest data for any item, left-click the status light or the name to drill down to the BSC for more information. By providing high-level views of key data, the Business Service Console s built-in notification mechanisms ensure your business services and the infrastructure are always available and ready to meet the needs of end users. 2

3 Concord s Business Service Console offers the following benefits: Easy to understand aggregate status of critical IT services. Immediately identify problems with business services that impact your employees and customers, and quickly quantify which services and users are affected. Determine whether IT staff is aware of the problem and who is actively addressing it. Monitor business services continuously with the aid of a scrolling ticker on your desktop. Customize views to focus on the performance of particular functions, organizations, business services, applications and/or locations that are of concern to you. ehealth Release 5.7 brings two new features to the BSC service notes and expanded application hierarchy. Service Notes For business managers who want to be sure the IT staff is working to address a problem, it s now as easy as reviewing a virtual Post-it-note. When someone generates a Service Note for an application, an icon appears on the BSC screen next to the application name. By clicking on the note s contents, business users can learn why a service is having a problem, confirm that someone is aware of the issue, and receive regular updates on progress. In addition, business stakeholders can, through BSC administration, automatically receive service notes through to alert them of status change. Expanded Application Hierarchy An expanded tier of application granularity helps you to determine which part of an application is having a problem. For example, problems begin to occur in your Outlook application. With the BSC s Expanded Application Hierarchy feature, an IT professional can identify the parts of the application that are responsible for the slowdown (in this case, Outlook Calendar and an issue on the Default-Exchange Server). It can also identify if users accessing that application are impacted. This level of detail speeds fault resolution, allowing users and the applications they access to return to optimum performance. 3

4 Service Availability Successful businesses rely heavily on sophisticated and complex software applications to support their on-going business operations. Unresponsive applications affect revenue generation, frustrate customers, and interrupt vital supply chains. Service Availability (SA) performs continuous active test transactions to targeted servers, verifying that all the components of an application service are working and responding within acceptable service thresholds. If response and downtime violate the thresholds, SA sends an SNMP trap to your fault management system notifying you of problems. Immediate notification of delays and downtime enable you to take action quickly to ensure that your mission-critical services are available. SA uses Active Testing to achieve optimum management of application response time and availability. Active Testing enables continuous coverage for your business applications, even during low activity times such as nights, holidays, off-peak hours, and weekends. When any of the active tests fail, or when transactions take too long, Service Availability notifies you so you can take proactive measures to resolve problems before customers or employees are impacted. SA provides robust coverage for your businesscritical services and applications with many standard tests including the following: Test Type DNS HTTP/HTTPS POP3/SMTP/ Roundtripmail FTP PING NNTP TCP CONNECT Virtual User Custom Services Description Detect name resolution bottlenecks to avoid service disruption. Measure Web Page download time from locations around the world. Ensure the consistency and quality of mail services. Ensure that file transfer services are running smoothly. Ensure the availability, reachability, and responsiveness of hardware devices. Ensure that notes posted on Usenet groups can be easily posted and retrieved. Detect system and service failures and ensure network connectivity to users. Measure the actions of end users (used in conjunction with a record and playback tool). Leverage your own custom scripts to perform any response test desired. 4

5 With SA 2.0 the management of your Service Availability tests is centralized from one ehealth system you can now create and manage SA tests for all your SA test systems, allowing users to: Create tests independently of agents, group them into test sets with agents and agent sets in a test profile. When you commit your changes, ehealth deploys the tests to each agent and creates paths automatically for each test-agent association in the test profile. This allows you to manage and apply SA tests by lines of business. Monitor all tests on an agent, or all agent-test associations in a test profile, to obtain real-time data. This capability enables users to monitor active tests they have created to verify they are working correctly. Users can monitor tests by selecting one or more agents or by selecting one or more test profiles. Change the Monitor page columns and filter the information by hostname, test type or row status. Enables users to personalize their views with a realtime display of the active SA tests running on the agents and the latest measurements. This supplies users with immediate feedback on the SA test results and status. In SA you can also link directly from the Test Profile Monitor page to a list of the profile s ehealth paths and from the path list to the Run-At-a-Glance Report. In addition, SA 2.0 provides the capability to test the following services: Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) File I/O Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) Network Information System (NIS) Internet Message Across Protocol (IMAP) and Messaging Application Program Interface (MAPI) SNMP Protocol SQL database servers (with default drivers included). Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) SA 2.0 also provides you with the capability to: Broaden protocol support for round-trip e- mail tests including IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) and MAPI (Messaging Application Program Interface). Secure passwords locally on the SA system without having to display them in Aview. Retain greater flexibility in running Virtual User (VU) tests as a specific user on the Windows platform. Specify the minimum number of required matches for HTTP and HTTPS content tests to ensure specific URL pages load correctly. This enables users to perform more complete tests on text strings present on the page. With Service Availability you can: Test availability and response time of business services 24x7. Gain visibility into the complex, n-tier infrastructure, pinpointing problems and fixing them before users are affected. Obtain real-time notification of delays, outages, or performance problems. Confirm that your services are performing well against service level agreements. Maintain historical data for capacity planning, troubleshooting, or analyzing trends in long-term behavior. 5

6 Application Response Concord s ehealth Application Response is a powerful software solution that enables IT professionals to meet business commitments by measuring what matters most: applications that drive the business from the view that matters the most the end users vantage point. New enhancements in 5.7 include the following: Collect events for Java applications and applets. Users can now use Application Response to monitor Java applications and applets by enabling the feature when you create your agent installation program or by downloading the Java Application Monitor from the new Download page. Command line tools to configure agents. This new feature enables users to easily manage a large number of AR agents. From the ehealth command line interface, users can now perform many of the management tasks available through the Web interface, including listing, adding, modifying, and deleting agents and other sub-tasks. Monitor homegrown applications using AR rule types. When users create a new Web or Windows application and do not plan to modify their rules, they can choose from two new AR application types AvgWebResponse and AvgWinResponse. The rules associated with these new application types track more events to provide true average response time reporting. View rules the AR agent uses to monitor your application. Users now have immediate information on what transactions an agent observes for a particular application. Modify certain global settings and specify agent upgrade information for multiple agents. This feature replaces the standalone AR Configuration Manager on Windows ehealth systems and the AR configuration script on UNIX ehealth systems. It enables users to modify ehealth port numbers, change the terminal services monitoring mode, enable transaction logging for all agents, and specify agent upgrade settings. Download AR Tools. Users can now download the AR Agent Publisher, BT Studio, and the Java Application Monitor from the AR Web interface, making application access much more convenient. BT Studio Enhancements In 5.7 you can further refine the rule writing process with clauses that narrow the number of transactions the agent detects. This allows you to more easily identify only those transactions that you want to include in your rule in the following ways: Define up to five failure cases per transaction. Monitor transactions that involve a failure to load a Web Page in Internet Explorer. Disregard events that might incorrectly affect the response time measurements of monitored transactions. Ignore a transaction if a particular event (or any one of several events occur). 6

7 Live Health Concord s Live Health suite is a powerful tool that gives users access to real-time performance and availability management for rapid problem diagnosis. In Live Status users can now do the following: Easily create diagrams that display response applications, modules, and module sets as separate branches in the Live Status diagram. This feature enables users to separate out alarms by application. In 5.7 Live Health is integrated with Service Availability, allowing users to more easily configure, manage and enhance their visibility through: New Drill-Downs to Service Availability. This feature allows easier navigation from Live Health to Service Availability. From Live Status you can drill down from elements or alarms; from Live Exceptions you can drill down from alarms. Certification of SystemEDGE traps for monitoring Service Availability. Obtain troubleshooting details that specifically relate to each type of SA test or the status of the Service Availability plug-in. Web Help for Service Availability profiles. Users can drill down from a Live Health alarm directly to Web Help specific to that alarm with recommended actions for rendition. New Live Exceptions profiles for monitoring Service Availability. Users can determine when and why a test is failing. Drill down from a branch within the response application diagram to Live Exceptions. Focus a user s attention on alarms associated with specific applications. View unused elements in a diagram. Display unused elements with gray icons so users can instead focus on active elements and the alarms associated with them. Save the image of a diagram as a JPG file. Users can copy diagrams into other applications, to store the image within specific documents or include in e- mails. 7

8 SystemEDGE SystemEDGE s real-time self monitoring quickly detects system and application problems and automatically runs scripts with actions you specify that can restart applications to correct problems 24x7. SystemEDGE enables you to fix problems before they impact users, free up valuable IT human resources and maximize return on investment. In Release 5.7 SystemEDGE is now supported on several new platforms including: Windows 2003 Digital UNIX 5.1B Red Hat Linux 3.0 (AS, ES, WS) on both x86 and Itanium HP Itanium Solaris 2.9 This flexibility ensures that whatever platform your business runs on, SystemEDGE agents are easily and accurately deployed. On Windows, SystemEDGE is no longer a subagent of the Microsoft SNMP service. As a separate service, you can now control the agent from the Control Panel, stopping and starting it independently of the Microsoft SNMP service. In addition, SystemEDGE now supports Windows clustered servers. If one Windows server fails and a fail-over node starts, SystemEDGE can likewise change over to the agent on the failover node; your ehealth reports for the server will have continuous data. Exchange Application Insight Module 5.7 also adds support for Microsoft Exchange As a plug-in, it works with the SystemEDGE agent to closely manage the Microsoft Exchange application, providing real-time fault detection and running scripts with actions that enable applications to be restarted or administrators to be contacted when problems arise. You can configure scripts and actions to correct problems that might occur. The ehealth AIM for Microsoft Exchange provides the following new features: Ability to support mixed Microsoft Exchange server environments (that is, support for data collection in environments in which Exchange 5.5 servers coexist with Exchange 2000 and 2003). Identify when Exchange servers are running in a cluster and running in active or passive mode. New At-a-Glance reports and trend variables for reporting on SMTP, LDAP and Web Mail activity. Support for expanded performance variables including authentication tracking, critical queue, mailbox, private and public message performance, memory and cache utilization, traffic counts, Exchange directory monitoring and more. 8

9 Installation With 5.7, sizing your system for ehealth and installing the very latest fixes and certifications have never been easier. InstallPlus is an installation program that allows you to reduce downtime by installing the very latest ehealth fixes and certifications as part of an install or upgrade in a single procedure. The InstallPlus program saves the latest installation files in a directory on the ehealth system, and then prompts a user for the location of the general release CD or disk image. It then installs the general release of ehealth software plus the additional patches and certification updates available for that release. When you install or upgrade, you can be confident that with a single step your ehealth system is up-to-date with the latest changes. Also new to 5.7 is the ehealth Sizing Wizard, a web-based tool that simplifies the process of sizing a system for ehealth and ensuring that the system can support your current or future needs. The wizard automates the process by: Calculating ehealth system requirements, such as CPU, disk space, and memory Determining if a new or existing ehealth system meets basic operating system requirements Experienced Oracle DBA s can create a custom layout of the tablespaces in the ehealth database by using the interactive features of the ehealth Sizing Wizard. The Wizard helps DBAs to visualize their layout options and ensure that the ehealth database conforms to their Oracle performance standards. Database Support In 5.7 the ehealth database has been expanded to allow ehealth to poll your elements for up to 80 variables. You can now create up to 15 custom variables for monitoring the performance of all ehealth element types. Previously, ehealth polled up to 30 variables for each element type. Some element types, such as systems, Frame Relay, PVC, and modem pools, were not customizable because all of the variables were in use or reserved by Concord. By using the ehealth Custom Variable application, you can add custom variables and report on them in the same day. 9 Copyright 2004 Concord Communications, Inc. ehealth, the Concord Logo, Live Health, Live Status, SystemEDGE, AdvantEDGE and/or other Concord marks or products referenced herein are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Concord Communications, Inc. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.