Monitoring tool can't supply wealth of detail, but reduced risk of crashing makes it attractive.
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While an agent-less monitoring tool cannot supply the wealth of detail of an agent-based product, its simpler environment, reduced risk of crashing a server and easier deployment make it a compelling and tempting choice.
Heroix says its new Longitude 3.0 agent-less system can monitor a network well enough to give servers and applications the same uptime and availability as agent-based tools. We recently tested Heroix and found that it serves up a plethora of useful and timely data on server and application behaviors. It kept tabs on several specific server platforms and applications, was easy to deploy and use, produced helpful reports, and didn’t cost an arm and a leg in license fees.
Remote monitoring
Longitude can monitor seven platforms (Windows Server 2000/2003, Windows XP, Red Hat Linux, SuSE Linux, Sun Solaris, HP’s HP-UX and IBM’s AIX), two Web servers (Microsoft Internet Information Server and Apache), three relational databases (SQL Server, Oracle and MySQL), three Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition application servers (WebSphere, WebLogic and JBoss) and one e-mail server (Exchange 2000/2003).
In addition to monitoring such infrastructure elements as Active Directory, , Cisco devices, Dell OpenManage and HP Insight Manager, Longitude can issue synthetic transactions to check on the health of services that include , FTP, HTTP, Network News Transfer Protocol, , Secure Shell (SSH) and Telnet. It also can determine whether devices are responding, ports are connected, or a background service or a particular computer program is running.
In our tests, Longitude excelled at monitoring these platforms, programs and infrastructure elements. If your computing environment matches what Longitude supports, you’ll likely find its agent-less architecture and superior monitoring capability an effective tool to maintain high availability and uptime. On the other hand, Longitude does not offer specific support for some other products, including Netscape Web server software, IBM DB2, Sybase Adaptive Server, Lotus Notes, mainframe operating systems and servers.
Longitude’s agent-less architecture is closely tied to the level of remote instrumentation available in the supported platforms, programs and infrastructure elements. Longitude can glean its useful metrics smartly, because it knows how to query Oracle to discover a red flag item, such as the number of transactions waiting for a redo log buffer.
DB2 offers something similar (the Get Tablespace Statistics function), but DB2 requires the user making a query to first log on to DB2 as an administrator. Moreover, because more companies rely on Oracle or SQL Server than DB2 or Adaptive Server, Heroix opted to support more commonly used databases. Longitude uses Windows Management Instrument (WMI) to acquire Windows operating system statistics. It uses SSH, Telnet and rexec to obtain Unix a
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In our tests, Longitude excelled at monitoring these platforms, programs and infrastructure elements. If your computing environment matches what Longitude supports, you’ll likely find its agent-less architecture and superior monitoring capability an effective tool to maintain high availability and uptime. On the other hand, Longitude does not offer specific support for some other products, including Netscape Web server software, IBM DB2, Sybase Adaptive Server, Lotus Notes, mainframe operating systems and servers.
Longitude’s agent-less architecture is closely tied to the level of remote instrumentation available in the supported platforms, programs and infrastructure elements. Longitude can glean its useful metrics smartly, because it knows how to query Oracle to discover a red flag item, such as the number of transactions waiting for a redo log buffer.
DB2 offers something similar (the Get Tablespace Statistics function), but DB2 requires the user making a query to first log on to DB2 as an administrator. Moreover, because more companies rely on Oracle or SQL Server than DB2 or Adaptive Server, Heroix opted to support more commonly used databases. Longitude uses Windows Management Instrument (WMI) to acquire Windows operating system statistics. It uses SSH, Telnet and rexec to obtain Unix and Linux performance data.
To get activity data on the three supported databases, it uses WMI, SSH and Java Database Connectivity. To monitor Exchange, Longitude uses WMI. It uses WMI, SSH and JMX to get metrics from J2EE application servers, and employs WMI, SSH and HTTP to monitor Web servers.
When Longitude detects a threshold violation, it can e-mail one or more people and can page a network administrator via an e-mail gateway. Longitude optionally sends alerts (traps) to, for example, HP OpenView, and Longitude can execute an operating system command or external computer program when a problem occurs.
Ease of use
Longitude’s user interface is entirely browser-based. Intuitive and easy to navigate, the interface uses Secure-HTTP for security. It works with Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher, Netscape 7.2 or higher and Firefox 1.0.1 or higher. Longitude’s highly customizable views of monitored systems can show all the systems or, based on criteria you set up, specific groups of servers and devices by department, region or other filter.
Longitude’s service-level agreement (SLA) dashboard display shows at a glance whether you’re meeting the SLA objectives that you set up, and the historical SLA reports reveal SLA compliance for specified time periods. Longitude’s reports were particularly helpful for spotting trends, planning for network additions, and analyzing general network and application activity.
We especially liked Longitude’s self-maintenance features. It handled its database administration and other internal chores with aplomb, and didn’t require us to spend any time attending to Longitude’s own environment.
Installing Longitude took only 15 minutes. It runs on a subset of the platforms it can monitor – Windows 2003, Red Hat Linux (V9 or ES 3.0) and SuSE Linux 9. The printed documentation was clear and comprehensive but lacked an index.
Because it does an excellent job of monitoring key metrics without requiring an agent on each server, we recommend you take a close look at Longitude. If Longitude supports your computing environment, its useful reports, timely alerts and simple maintenance may well save your company money while it helps ensure high server availability and uptime.
Nance runs Network Testing Labs and is the author of Introduction to Networking, 4th edition, and Client/Server LAN Programming. He can be reached at barryn_@erols.com.
Nance is also a member of the Network World Lab Alliance, a cooperative of the premier reviewers in the network industry, each bringing to bear years of practical experience on every review. For more Lab Alliance information, including what it takes to become a member, go to www.networkworld.com/alliance.
