Three features that matter most for IT pros to drive business rapidly and effectively

We asked Centerity’s experts to recommend on three must-have features to ensure a cost-effective IT operations performance. We’ll be talking more about why you should put those features in priority in our next E-journal. For now, here are the three things you are  encouraged to keep in mind:

We asked Centerity’s experts to recommend on three must-have features to ensure a cost-effective IT operations performance. We’ll be talking more about why you should put those features in priority in our next E-journal. For now, here are the three things you are  encouraged to keep in mind:

Key value for any Performance Analytics software solution is how it ensures SPEED. How fast you setup new technology is an indication of the completeness of the solution. How quickly you adapt to IT changes is an indication of the flexibility of your product.How rapidly you identify root causes and generate reports is an indication of the value of your product (reduces MTTR).

How fast are you to satisfy your business needs is a matter of what Analytics platform you have.

There are many important characteristics of a good monitoring and Performance software solution. If I have to chose three features only, here are the ones to ensure a rapid and reliable software solution for IT Operations teams:

Service Level Reporting – Advanced SLA reports and Performance templates that ensure successful operation of Applications on your platform, along with the rest of the IT and business systems.

Automated Discovery that detects and identify components (Software and Hardware), categorize, normalize and assess metrics, together with Topology and Dependency Maps to provide a real time and consistent map of your business data. Detecting and fixing potential performance issues before customers are affected is critical for improving service levels and CSAT.

Ease-of-Use and Deployment Flexibility with Integrated Configuration Management Database (“CMDB”) –  Integrated CMDB provides effective incident remediation, discovery, storage and   tracking of configuration information for each element.

Interested in more? Here you’ll discover how to overcome conflicting demands for improved performance and reduced costs

OEM with Centerity

Many hardware vendors with classic IT practices in servers, storage, networking, converged and hyperconverged infrastructures have their own tool(s) to collect performance data from its own equipment to assess performance and effect management.  The same can be said for IoT/IIoT vendors with end-point devices like sensors and actuators as well as more complex infrastructures and systems involved in communications, energy, utility and smart city applications.

The common limitation across all these vendors is that true systemic analytics on performance is not possible due to the fact that many third party components are involved in these deliverables are not controlled by the principal vendor so data captured will be either inconsistent or non-existent.  Furthermore, when these Operational Technologies (OT) need to be connected to Information Technologies (IT) for comprehensive views of systemic performance with a business context, these correlated views across OT and IT systems are currently impossible.  Equipment vendors are motivated to manage and monitor its own equipment but not the other 3rd party equipment and applications in the system.  First, it’s not their immediate concern and second, it’s just too hard with the number of third-parties involved now and there’s more to come.  Due to this, true systemic analytics is not possible and systems are operationally too complex with unacceptably high downtime and high operational expenses due to a lack of systemic automation and controls.

What’s an OEM to do?

Centerity has a purpose built, unified platform that is device/equipment/application agnostic to collect and analyze systemic data from any source creating actionable, systemic intelligence.  We have plugin methodologies that allow for the rapid extension of coverage to new or novel technologies.  This is essentially an abstraction layer between the devices and the collection methodologies to quickly provided end-to-end coverage and maintain that coverage in these dynamic environments.  Moreover, the ability to correlate systemic information across the OT and IT layers gives customers the business intelligence and business value they seek from these investments.

Centerity can create a tight integration with your proprietary equipment and provide cross-correlation of your data with other third-party data transforming siloed data into real systemic information.  And, we can do it quickly due to our award-winning, purpose-built, unified platform!  Through Centerity, once all these disparate device and applications are tied together, we can help you create real business value while reducing operational complexity, MTTR, and OPEX.  This dynamic reduces sales friction and creates a short time-to-value for your customers all leading to quicker follow-on and larger deals.

Intrested in more information? Find here what else can Centerity do for OEM

or Come talk to Centerity about giving you a real competitive advantage over the competition!

About Centerity

Centerity’s an award winning unified enterprise-class IT Performance Analytics Platform that improves Performance and Reliability of business services to ensure availability of critical systems. By delivering a consolidated view across all layers of the technology stack, including, applications, big data, operating systems, database, storage, compute, security, networking, cloud, edge AND IoT/IIoT devices, Centerity provides an early warning of performance issues along with corrective action tools to quickly isolate faults and identify root causes.

Unlock the True Value of Business Service Management!

Imagine you’re on the highway, nowhere near a service station, and your car starts making a strange sound—would you rather have an alert tell you there’s a spark plug misfiring or a gauge showing your engine overheating?

Probably both, but if you’re like me and you have no idea what a spark plug misfiring might mean for your car, I’d bet the first thing you’d want to know is that your engine is overheating, so you can turn your car off or go easy on the AC. You need to know what impact an issue is having on your overall process (driving, living, not being eaten by wolves after abandoning your car, etc.) so you can take actions to minimize potential damage. Save the misfiring spark plug for when you get to a service station outside of wolf country.

http://meshvox.tumblr.com/post/14520062429
http://meshvox.tumblr.com/post/14520062429

This is the basic thrust of Business Service Management (BSM) as an IT strategy. BSM assumes that IT exists to drive business and therefore the impact technological issues have on critical business processes should be the starting point for IT Operations. Rather than taking a siloed, techno-centric approach to IT, BSM favors a holistic, business service-centric strategy.

Great idea, right? Simple enough? And yet, this simple idea has proved hard to implement in the past. As I will show, this difficulty has led many early BSM adopters to abandon their attempts after not realizing the results they were promised and many more to never attempt BSM in the first place.

Off to a Rough Start

For BSM to work and accurately reflect the health of the business, performance monitoring must be holistic, extending across all IT assets. Makes sense—if all the technologies used by an organization exist to drive the business, then getting only a partial picture of the technology would necessarily mean getting only a partial picture of the business. Therefore, the first step to implementing BSM is to find a tool that can collect performance data from all your technologies—not just infrastructure and the network.
Not surprisingly, legacy software vendors led the charge in offering the end-to-end monitoring solutions necessary for BSM. They all promised the demise of siloed IT operations, but one after another proved too unwieldy, complex, and expensive. The cost and pain of managing the IT environment became the cost and pain of managing the IT management tool.

Because these legacy solutions comprised tools and functionalities gained through corporate acquisition vs. in-house development, the end-user was presented with a suite of tools to choose from, few of which were purpose-built to work together and all of which required individual installation, integration, and maintenance. Deployments stretched on for months, even years, and once in place, the complexity of using and maintaining the tools required so many dedicated staff members that rising operating expenses eclipsed any savings that might have been realized from implementing BSM in the first place.

Even worse, the complexity of the tools and inability of the various modules to play nicely together made achieving true BSM impossible anyway, as data and alerts from the modules covering each technology layer could not be correlated in real-time, making overall business service status chronically inaccurate.

With these practical barriers to success, it’s no wonder that after the better part of a decade since legacy BSM solutions became available, the majority of adopters have either displaced their legacy solutions altogether or added more tools to cover gaps in functionality, too daunted by the prospect of having to rip out a tool that required so large an investment in time and money to set up in the first place. Neither should it come as any surprise that their experiences have scared off so many from attempting BSM.

Learning from Failure: A New Hope (and a Shameless Plug)

Centerity is pretty much Luke Skywalker [Full Stop]

Just as Luke grew up in the shadow of the Empire, only to rise up and instill hope for a better future in a beleaguered Republic, Centerity uses badass Jedi tricks to bring BSM to IT Ops teams everywhere! And by “Jedi tricks”, I, of course, mean a unified architecture and codeless plugin methodology for integrating with new technologies.

As we’ve learned above, for BSM to succeed in accurately reflecting the overall health of the business, a monitoring solution must satisfy two points: 1.) It must be able to extend to all IT assets leveraged by an organization and 2.) It must be able to correlate data from those assets in real-time for cross-domain impact analysis and alerting.

Centerity was purpose-built as a platform, not an amalgamation of tools, for delivering end-to-end performance monitoring analytics in a single software appliance. This means fast deployments and virtually no maintenance because there is only one piece of software to install and maintain. Say goodbye to tortuous multi-month/quarter deployments and say hello to immediate results and low total cost of ownership (TCO)!

http://www.mememaker.net/static/images/memes/4663111.jpg
http://www.mememaker.net/static/images/memes/4663111.jpg

Crucially, Centerity is the most extensible monitoring solution available! Most tools only support agent-based or agentless monitoring. Centerity’s platform supports both because we know that no two IT environments are the same and you need a solution that can meet the varying and exacting demands of today’s dynamic data center environments. Additionally, the platform boasts hundreds of custom scripts, API integrations, and more to make sure there is never a gap in our support. This is why our solution is being used to monitor everything from environmental equipment for the Internet of Things (IoT) to Big Data and In-memory processing solutions like Hadoop and SAP HANA on converged and hyper-converged platforms.

And because all of this functionality is contained in a single appliance, there is no need to correlate data between separate modules, allowing performance analytics to be distributed across the platform immediately and cross-domain analysis to occur in real-time.

BSM Nirvana

4

This is true BSM. We call it BSM Nirvana: a single dial representing the service availability of your most critical business services. In essence, a single pane of glass for viewing your entire business. Because you don’t just want to know if there’s a discard error on a router—you want to know immediately what that means for your business. It’s time to stop worrying about technology and start growing your business!

Interested in more information how BSM drives business? Learn more here 

About Centerity

Centerity’s an award winning unified enterprise-class IT Performance Analytics Platform that improves Performance and Reliability of business services to ensure availability of critical systems. By delivering a consolidated view across all layers of the technology stack, including, applications, big data, operating systems, database, storage, compute, security, networking, cloud, edge AND IoT/IIoT devices, Centerity provides an early warning of performance issues along with corrective action tools to quickly isolate faults and identify root causes.

 

CENTERITY AT GLOBAL SAP TECHED 2017: SUPPORTING COMMUNITY INNOVATION AND DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Last  month in Las Vegas, Marty Pejko met with SAP experts and community leaders to discuss how Big Data (HANA, Hadoop) customers can capture critical performance and operational analytics to help maximize the return on its investments.

 Marty also met our long-time partners Dell-EMC (Vblock, VxRail, Vision), Cisco (FlexPod), Nutanix and Pure Storage (FlashStack).

While converged and hyperconverged architectures will speed deployments, these by themselves lack comprehensive performance and operational analytics at the Application and OS layers, where 90% of failures occur. This is where Centerity comes in. 

Marty Pejco, COO Centerity with Lawrence Wilcox, Director of Strategic Alliance, Nutanix

Centerity can capture all performance and operational metrics from the Application, OS and Infrastructure Layers, correlating these metrics across all domains to provide smart impact, alerting and root cause analysis. Furthermore, if multiple systems or architectures are involved, Centerity’s visualization tools can simplify the operations of these complex environments in immediately intuitive ways.

ABOUT CENTERITY

Centerity’s award winning software provides a unified enterprise-class IT performance analytics platform that improves performance and reliability of business services to ensure availability of critical systems. By delivering a consolidated view across all layers of the technology stack including, applications, Big Data, operating systems, database, storage, compute, security, networking, Cloud, Edge, and IoT/IIoT devices, Centerity provides an early warning of performance issues along with corrective action tools to quickly isolate faults and identify root causes.

 

CENTERITY SPEEDS APACHE KAFKA WITH MONITORING & PERFORMANCE ANALYTICS

Real Life Scenario:

In retail chain stores it’s common to have RFID sensors on the shelves, that need to send data to the warehouse and make an order for the missing stock. Apache Kafka is a popular platform used by big-box retailers as they need big-data platforms to support their activity. There’s a potential risk of loosing money if it’s not identified in time that the Kafka stream doesn’t work and doesn’t transfer the message that the retailer is out of stock. In this case, the empty shelf would not be filled up and the retailer would be unprofitable.

Overview

APACHE-KAFKA Diagram, from: https://kafka.apache.org/

Apache Kafka is an open-source stream processing platform developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Scala and Java. Kafka is used for building real-time data pipelines and streaming apps. It is horizontally scalable, fault-tolerant, wicked fast, and runs in production in thousands of companies. 

Additionally, Kafka connects to external systems (for data import/export) via Kafka Connect and provides Kafka Streams, a Java stream processing library.

Optimizing Apache Kafka Performance

Apache Kafka is a Big Data platform operating distributed applications running on large clusters of hardware so chances are big for down time and data motion interruptions. Kafka users, having a complex IT environment, must-have a clear end-to-end monitoring and performance view of their business key performance metrics. They need to align delivery expectations with required levels of service availability and performance for both external and internal customers (SLA/OLA).

How Centerity Improves Apache Kafka processes?

Centerity’s unified IT performance analytics platform supports Apache Kafka data intensive framework and is a certified for a variety of Hadoop distributions which Kafka may be implemented with. Centerity provides, real-time end to end visibility to the entilr Kafka environment stack including  Hardware, OS, Networking, Systems, Applications and more.

  1. Centerity’s integration with Apache Kafka includes selected, best practice metrics with a flexibility to add custom metrics from JMX and change alert thresholds.
  1. The implementation is quick because Centerity provides Unified platform which is installable as a single software appliance.
  1. Centerity continuously cycles through the system collecting metrics from each device or application in scope and normalizes this data for cross-domain, impact, trend and root cause analysis.
  1. Executive Dashboards present Real-time service levels of key business process that can be drilled into for deeper inspection.
  1. Dynamic thresholds are triggered and issued before warnings become critical and while proactive actions can be taken.
  1. History data can be analyzed for continuous process improvements.

About Centerity

Centerity’s award winning software provides a unified enterprise-class IT performance analytics platform that improves performance and reliability of business services to ensure availability of critical systems. By delivering a consolidated view across all layers of the technology stack including, applications, Big Data, operating systems, database, storage, compute, security, networking, Cloud, Edge, and IoT/IIoT devices, Centerity provides an early warning of performance issues along with corrective action tools to quickly isolate faults and identify root causes.

 

PERFORMANCE ANALYTICS SOLUTIONS FOR CLOUDERA HADOOP

With Centerity’s new monitoring & performance Analytics solution, Cloudera users experience greater operational satisfaction and higher ROI for their Hadoop investment.

When implementing a complex Hadoop environment such as Cloudera, users who take full advantage of Cloudera Manager’s performance and alert functionalities need to ensure the performance and availability of their Hadoop hosts, services, jobs and have an overall sense of control in managing their applications and entire IT environment.

With Centerity, Cloudera users experience greater operational satisfaction and higher ROI for their Hadoop investment

How it works?

  • Centerity’s integration to Cloudera’s API, provides complete end-to-end monitoring beginning with Cloudera’s service health analysis using Cloudera’s health check results. Centerity detects performance issues using Cloudera Metrics and preferred thresholds. Additionally, any event that surfaces in Cloudera Manager out of hundreds of possible event codes will be alerted, reported and notified on via Centerity Monitor.
  • Centerity runs a full inventory analysis on the Cloudera environment, discovering all clusters, hosts, services and possible metrics. In addition, Centerity’s technology           goes beyond monitoring data, to provide Intuitive visualization and clear context for the information gathered.
  • Centerity is a Cloudera certified unified IT monitoring and performance analytics platform that offers a real-time visibility of ALL IT and operations assets, together with predictive, trend, impact and root cause analysis.  This  consolidated view reduces operational complexity, time (MTTR) and cost (OPEX).
  •  Cloudera Manager and all Hadoop components are well positioned within Centerity to support hybrid operations, as they provide a consistent experience on-prem and in the cloud

 

Professional Performance Analytics and advanced modules available for MSP’s

According to a recent report published by MarketsandMarkets, the North American IT Managed Services market is predicted to grow to 242.45B USD by 2021, up from 145.33B in 2016.[1] Such a positive forecast underscores the massive explosion in modern IT complexity and the consequential increasing reliance of business leaders on outsourced IT experts. Likely as a result of this trend, the managed services industry has been and continues to undergo a massive shift in the way it delivers value to IT consumers. Gone are the days of reactive break/fix services, in favor of proactive ongoing management and maintenance, with the goal of identifying trends and preventing potentially disruptive technology issues before they can cause service degradation and disrupt critical business services. This shift exemplifies the larger consumer trend toward “____-as-a-service” consumption models, eschewing ad hoc investments in CAPEX for the more stable, predictable OPEX.

Not all managed service providers (MSPs) are created equal, however–nor do they all deliver the same services. A vendor’s services are only as effective as the tools they use and in this industry predicated on keeping up with new technologies and identifying potential risks proactively, no tool is more important than the IT performance analytics solution or Remote Monitoring & Management (RMM) tool.

Having a robust, holistic monitoring solution in place is absolutely crucial to maintaining the health and availability of complex, hybrid technology environments and providing clear, achievable service level agreements (SLAs) to clients.

And just like the sea change in the services industry at large, there has been an equally disruptive shift in performance analytics solutions and the value and features they are expected to deliver.

In basic terms, RMM solutions allow IT staff to continuously monitor and manage the health and availability of infrastructure components, augmenting the performance of present technical staff and maximizing use of resources.[1] Some solutions will offer more around management, including professional service automation (PSA) tools that incorporate support ticketing mechanisms, customer billing, and more, but for the most part RMM and PSA tools remain separate, with vendors instead differentiating their offerings through partnerships and ease of integration with PSA vendors. Unfortunately, when it comes to the actual monitoring, there has been little innovation—most tools still only provide basic monitoring of endpoints, network monitoring, and remote access to desktops, usually relying on the use of software agents installed in client environments to collect and send data back to RMM system. With the rise of cloud services, many vendors have come forward with SaaS RMM appliances in an attempt to court customers looking for an easy to maintain solution, but the monitoring itself remains no more sophisticated. Additionally problematic for MSPs with many diverse client environments, SaaS models necessarily require connectivity to the cloud, which may preclude clients in industries with strict security requirements (e.g. financial, government, etc.).

The biggest problem, however, whether SaaS or on-prem, are these tools’  failure to cover the application and database layers.

The recent leaps in application/database capabilities (e.g. ERP, Big Data, IoT) and their value to businesses, have understandably led to an application-centric view of technology in general. But even in a world of hyper-converged infrastructure and software-defined networking, there is still a dependence on infrastructure, physical or virtual, and for a monitoring solution to only consider one technology layer to the detriment of the other is to consider effect without cause. Most organizations still rely on using separate tools to monitor their infrastructure vs. applications. Not only does this mean higher spend on vendor licenses, it results in huge operational inefficiencies by forcing admins to constantly switch between tools and screens in an attempt to manually correlate alerts for an overall status of the environment. This means longer mean-time-to-restore (MTTR) from service disruptions and difficulty meeting customer SLAs.

What’s needed is a single solution capable of extending to every technology layer to correlate alerts from infrastructure, networking, and applications in real-time, while maintaining a single pane of glass view for seamless remediation.

Centerity Performance Analytics provides comprehensive technology to managed service providers, because it is designed to cover every technology layer while being extensible enough to monitor cutting-edge, disruptive technologies such as Big Data (SAP HANA, Hadoop, etc.), containers (Docker, etc.), and even IoT.

Most tools offer either agent-based or agentless monitoring, severely limiting the types and amounts of data they can collect. Centerity supports both methods, along with leveraging countless API integrations, to ensure that there is nothing in your clients’ data centers we can’t connect to and collect data from. Its multi-tenanted and federated architecture makes it ideal for scaling up and down according to your client base while ensuring that customer environments can be viewed and managed separately, an absolutely essential feature for any service provider.

Most important of all, however, is Centerity’s ability to deliver holistic, real-time SLA monitoring and reporting. Made possible only because the platform can extend across a client’s entire technology environment without leaving any gaps, Centerity can track the service availability of their critical business processes or even their entire environment, so there is never any question of whether you’re achieving your contractual SLA with your customers!

The technology landscape and its intersection with the world of business is growing every day, and with it, your opportunities to generate greater revenue. Your team keeps up with it—it’s time your tools did too!

Intrested in more information? Learn more here about Centerity Systems future of IT Performance Monitoring for MSPs

[1]Managed Services Market by Data Center (Hosting, Colocation, and Storage), Infrastructure (Print Services, Desktop, Inventory), Networking (Remote Monitoring, MPLS, VPNS), Information, Mobility, Communications, and Security – Global Forecast to 2021”. www.marketsandmarkets.com. 2016-09. Retrieved on 2016-09-30.

[2]Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM)”. www.techopedia.com. Retrieved on 2016-09-27.

[1]Managed Services Market by Data Center (Hosting, Colocation, and Storage), Infrastructure (Print Services, Desktop, Inventory), Networking (Remote Monitoring, MPLS, VPNS), Information, Mobility, Communications, and Security – Global Forecast to 2021”. www.marketsandmarkets.com. 2016-09. Retrieved on 2016-09-30.

SEPARATING THE URGENT FROM THE IMPORTANT IN MANAGED SERVICES

“Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.” ― Stephen R. Covey

There’s a difference between an alert that feels urgent and one that is truly important,  and Jessica’s team can’t tell the difference

When the alert sounded, a quick glance at her screen told Jessica that database storage was critically low. Yet after a few minutes of double checking various settings and parameters she found that over 20% free space remained.  As she turned to face me, Jessica rolled her eyes and said, “I get over 200 alerts like that every day, and 98% of them are just noise. All my co-workers say the same thing, ‘We spend too much time chasing false alarms.’ If we could isolate the 4 alarms that really matter each day it would save me, and my company, a lot of time and a bundle of money.

For IT and managed service providers (MSP), false positives (false alarms) are the bane of system administration as they divert precious resources to fix phantom problems. False positives are like a recurring headache, you know something is wrong but you don’t know if it’s serious and you can’t figure it out without more data. The same is true for information systems, where every alarm should be investigated to determine if it’s a serious problem. Unfortunately, the amount of time wasted chasing phantom problems causes even the best system administrators to ignore certain alarms, and this will continue until they get burned by a loss of service (unscheduled downtime).

Receiving a system alert always feels urgent but there’s a difference between an alert that feels urgent and one that is truly important, and Jessica’s team can’t tell the difference. She may be curious about what caused the storage alert, but what Jessica really needs to know is whether the alert is important. Her answer is directly related to the nature of the storage system. For the database, an apparent sudden decrease in storage capacity is cause for concern because it could affect business services like billing and accounts receivable. But what if the storage alert isn’t going to affect the business at all and is simply the temporary result of routine load balancing processes? At the time of the alert, the database thinks it’s running out of space and isn’t aware that the larger storage system has been set up to prevent critical problems. As Jessica discovered, there is no urgency because it was a temporary condition, and other systems are in place to ensure stability.

Trying to implement custom logic regarding performance and service levels into each layer of the IT system is a fool’s game

Jessica’s dilemma, of too many false positives, is something that most system administrators face. Trying to implement custom logic regarding performance and service levels into each layer of the IT system is a fool’s game. For one thing, the logic can be incredibly complex and furthermore it changes with each new device or software upgrade (both applications and operating systems). Furthermore, it doesn’t make sense to filter out low-level alerts at each layer because they will be needed for fault isolation and root cause analysis. Finally, properly tuning custom alerts can be time-consuming, causing administrators to lose patience so they either take alerts at face value (with all the false positives) or they ignore everything and suffer the consequences. Instead, companies should consider using cross-domain correlation, which evaluates, compares and weighs critical metrics from each layer of the system (hardware and software) against required service levels. The result is a top-level dashboard on a single pane of glass that gives unprecedented insights, revealing the overall health of business information systems.

Single pane of glass executive dashboard
Comparing and weighing critical metrics from each layer of the system

With cross-domain correlation, Jessica could avoid all those alerts that seem urgent and focus instead on what’s truly important, delivering guaranteed service levels. Centerity’s solution is uniquely designed as a unified software platform that detects and extracts critical metrics from each layer of the information system and integrates with all existing devices, applications and monitoring tools to provide cross-domain correlation to system administrators, engineers and customer support reps (CSR), ensuring higher uptime, lower costs, better reliability and higher CSAT scores.

 

Centerity IT Performance Analytics Platform (Use Case #3 – Reducing MTTR)

Best Practices in Performance Monitoring for Big Data Environments (SAP HANA, Hadoop, Enterprise Applications)

Use Case #3 – Reducing Mean-Time-to-Restore (MTTR)

Synopsis:

  • Dynamic Threshold Alerting
  • Automated Remediation Actions
  • Outage Graphics

Use Case Overview

The number one driver of Customer Satisfaction and increasing Net Promoter Scores is reduced downtime. To do this, IT departments must avoid downtime and restore service quickly.

First, what is needed are smart static and dynamic thresholds that can provide proactive and automated actions before warnings become critical. While some circumstances can be anticipated with static thresholds, dynamic thresholds need to be “learned” by observing what is normal for a given hour of the day or day of the week.

Second, once topology and dependency maps are established, outages can be resolved quickly as alerts and graphical diagrams can pinpoint higher order problems that are causing a cascade of events. Resolving the higher order problem first is likely to resolve the lower order ones in the most expedient way.

Third, being able to see an entire business service view on a single console and show all the service levels from individual metrics to technology layers will highlight which component is causing a degradation of service and why. Seeing everything from a single console provides the entire organization with a single view of the truth upon which efficient and coordinated actions can be taken.

Technical Overview

Product Screen 8: Graphical Outage Screen

Outage Graphic

Centerity BSM & IT Performance Analytics Platform (Use Case #2 – Reducing Operational Complexity)

Best Practices in Performance Analytics  for Big Data Environments (SAP HANA, Hadoop, Enterprise Applications)

Use Case #2 – Reducing Operational Complexity

Synopsis:

  • Single Pane of Glass
  • Live Visual Layouts
  • Topology Mapping

Use Case Overview

Reducing operational complexity is key to the successful and efficient operation of any Big Data Environment. Having to jump from one console to another to gather performance metrics and manually correlate states for impact and trend analysis is not practical or efficient where automated, proactive intelligence is needed.

What is needed is a single-pane-of-glass across the entire Big Data Environment that can serve as a business intelligence layer across all the technical and functional domains. The business intelligence layer will normalize and organize performance metrics into technology layers and furthermore group these technologies into business process groups. These logical groups are called Business Service Management (BSM) process views.

Customized Live Visual Layouts can be created by importing any image (for example geographical maps, data center layouts, architectural schematics, technology stacks/racks) and overlaying status icons via Centerity’s GUI. All these icons are clickable and drillable. These live visual layouts represent how users want to view their environment and consume information. These layouts present intuitive ways of consuming information, not just because these are images, but because these are logical representations of the way individual users actually perform their functions.

Technical Overview

Product Screen 5: Central Dynamic Dashboard

Product Screen 6: Live Visual Layout (#1) – SAP HANA

Product Screen 7: Topology Mapping

Hypermap

About Centerity

Centerity’s an award winning unified enterprise-class IT Performance Analytics Platform that improves Performance and Reliability of business services to ensure availability of critical systems. By delivering a consolidated view across all layers of the technology stack, including, applications, big data, operating systems, database, storage, compute, security, networking, cloud, edge AND IoT/IIoT devices, Centerity provides an early warning of performance issues along with corrective action tools to quickly isolate faults and identify root causes.