If your network is a bit more heterogeneous and you need a monitoring tool that can handle diversity, Heroix’s Longitude should be on your short list.
Longitude does a superior job of monitoring a wide range of applications and operating environments. It comprehensively measures hundreds of operational metrics that it uses in its alerts, reports and graphical charts.
To help you tie your business functions to your network activity, Longitude gathers the right user- and business-related metrics, user-defined transaction metrics and trend data.
| Longitude’s statistical dashboard reveals status and health information in the form of configurable dials, graphs and charts. |
Longitude keeps tabs on Windows Server 2000/2003, XP, Red Hat Linux, SUSE Linux, Sun Solaris, HP HP-UX and IBM AIX. Longitude collects and reports performance details for Web servers (Microsoft Internet Information Server and Apache), databases (SQL Server, Oracle and MySQL), Java 2 Platforms Enterprise Edition application servers (WebSphere, WebLogic and JBoss), messaging environments (Exchange Server 2000 and 2003), user transactions (DNS, FTP, HTTP, Ping, Port, SMTP), and infrastructure (SNMP devices, Cisco devices, Active Directory and DHCP).
Longitude is a great service-level agreement tracker for documenting server uptime and availability. The SLA feature can aggregate servers to show, for instance, overall uptime for a group of servers that logically share a particular workload.
If one of five related servers suffers downtime, but the other four healthy servers continue to ensure application availability to the business community, Longitude accurately and correctly notes the server’s downtime on its dashboard and in its monitoring reports. In addition, its SLA feature reports the overall availability of the shared-server application as “good.”
When it detects a problem with one of the monitored systems, based on threshold criteria you’ve set up, Longitude uses its preconfigured internal SMTP server to send e-mail to the appropriate administrators and/or users. The e-mail contains a problem description along with sufficient detail to help a network administrator fix the problem. Longitude also can execute a program, either locally or remotely, to help solve the problem.
Longitude’s browser-based user interface is easy to navigate and understand. Longitude has thoughtfully designed real-time dashboards with pin-point drill-down capabilities.
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