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Posts Tagged ‘monitoring’

Tech Field Day 11 Preview: Comtrade

June 9th, 2016 No comments

Tech Field Day 11 is happening in Boston, from 22-24 June and I’m super happy to be invited as a delegate.

I’ve been previewing the companies attending, have a look at my introductory post: I’m heading to Tech Field Day 11 and DockerCon!

Comtrade

Comtrade-logo-lgComtrade is a slightly different company for Tech Field Day in that it is a sort of IT conglomerate that does system integration and is also a large software development house for hire. The Slovenian headquarted company wrote Ryanair’s booking system, has written mobile banking apps and in the IT world has written management tools for IBM, HP, EMC and Cisco. It has been around since 1990 and has 1500 staff of which more than 1000 are software developers.

We’re going to be hearing from Comtrade Software who are currently specialising in building management packs for SCOM. They have recently released a management pack for Nutanix which I presume is what we’ll be hearing about. They also have packs for Big-IP, F5 and Oracle Siebel. You can commision Comtrade to write a custom SCOM management back for your solution if you need it.

Interestingly they had a fairly comprehensive set of management packs for Citrix (XenDesktop,XenApp,XenMobile,NetScaler) which they’ve just sold to Citrix which will be integrated into the Platinum versions of the products. Is this the plan, develop management packs and sell them off or are they going to continue to sell them directly?

Who loves SCOM?

Microsoft System Centre Operations Manager to give it its its full title is an enterprise monitoring product which has a management pack system whereby you can install packs for all your infrastructure, be it hardware, backup software, applications etc. and SCOM can report on all manor of things that go down. I’ll be honest, I’ve never really loved SCOM, although it has integrations to everything I just have always found it overly complicated and difficult to tame. I’m also not a huge fan of SCCM, the OS and software deployment part of Microsoft System Center, so SCOM doesn’t have to feel like the only misunderstood child. SCOM is often purchased as part of a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement so many companies do use it extensively.

Nutanix

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Virtualisation Field Day 6 Preview: Cirba

November 10th, 2015 No comments

Virtualisation Field Day 6 is happening in Silicon Valley, California from 18th-20th November and I’m very lucky to be invited as a delegate.

I’ve been previewing the companies attending, have a look at my introductory post:I’m heading to Virtualisation Field Day 6.

I briefly met Cirba at VMworld Europe and they presented briefly at Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US this year. Cirba is a privately owned company and has been operating since 1999.

Define demand. Optimize supply. Automate.Cirba is a Canadian company with a product which is all about optimising workload placement. You use it to analyse your environment and it will tell you where you have overprovisioned resources and extra capacity or where you have underprovisioned resources and your VMs aren’t getting what they need. Knowing this allows you to right size your environment and save money by cleverly mixing workloads and also deciding where best your workloads should run or be provisioned.

They use a good analogy of using Tetris to try and fit all the resource pieces together but this is rather a more multi-dimensional game. You need to fit CPU/RAM/Network and storage pieces together where they don’t necessarily all have the same shape and size. You also need to overlay your business policies on top of this which makes for some interesting number crunching.

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Virtualisation Field Day 4 Preview: SolarWinds

January 8th, 2015 No comments

Virtualisation Field Day 4 is happening in Austin, Texas from 14th-16th January and I’m very lucky to be invited as a delegate.

I’ve been previewing the companies attending, have a look at my introductory post: Virtualisation Field Day 4 Preview.

400px-SolarWinds_logo[4]

logo for SolarWinds IT management software including server monitoring and network performance monitoringlogo for SolarWinds IT management software including server monitoring and network performance monitoring

Everyone has heard of SolarWinds and either used your seen their ubiquitous network monitoring product Orion but you may or may not be surprised to know that they do a lot more. They have a bunch more networking products apart from their monitoring product, know of Kiwi Syslog Server, that’s SolarWinds. They do server and application monitoring for over 150 apps as well as VMware, Hyper-V, Windows, AIX, UNIX, Solaris and Linux so fairly broad then.

They do security software with SIEM log and event management, Secure FTP, 3rd party patch deployment (Adobe, Java, Oracle etc.), firewall config management, database performance analysis (SQL, Oracle, DB2, Sybase)

So basically, SolarWinds provides products for monitoring every aspect of your infrastructure, I’m sure Docker is either done or on the roadmap!

This being Virtualisation Field Day, I would think SolarWinds will be talking about its Virtualization Manager to manage VMware and Hyper-V. You can monitor performance and capacity to your hearts content, manage VM Sprawl, track configuration changes, look at dashboards galore, map dependencies and use a module for VDI performance monitoring.

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