Enterprise Monitoring
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Soldato
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How bigs your estate?
Also there's this recent thread discussing a similar topic: https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/nagios-monitoring-branches-of.18820156/
Also there's this recent thread discussing a similar topic: https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/nagios-monitoring-branches-of.18820156/
Solarwinds Orion with NPM/NTA here - it's alright, we also use Solarwinds N-Central as we're an MSP which monitors our client estates. We're looking at implementing a proper SIEM package such as Splunk but we're not even ready for a POC yet.
Might be worth looking at SIEMs which are licensed by asset or user if you find Splunk or other tools based on throughput or EPS (Events Per Second) expensive. JASK and Rapid7 InsightIDR might be worth looking at.
Are you on the 2018.2 release of the Orion platform? That increased the limits for a number of modules - for instance NPM went from 100,000 elements to 400,000 elements and 100 Additional Polling Engines (APEs). Dyantrace seems an odd/interesting choice for SolarWinds replacement with it being more focused on APM rather than NPM.
My way of looking things is that you only monitor your servers and network, in order to provide a service to your customer. The customer is interested in the availability of the application, they don't care whether your network has packet loss, or high ping, or whether your disk is full on the server. They care whether their application is running quickly.
Thats why I find dynatrace an interesting proposition. Didn't mean to hijack the thread of course - but you surely want an intelligent solution that is able to map the 'service' (or application) and all the associated potential factors that could affect its performance
Thats why I find dynatrace an interesting proposition. Didn't mean to hijack the thread of course - but you surely want an intelligent solution that is able to map the 'service' (or application) and all the associated potential factors that could affect its performance
I'll definitely be taking a look at multiple SIEM products for our POC - cost doesn't bother us too much as we offset the cost by selling the monitoring to our clients, but I definitely want the best tool for the job, and we have an everchanging workload at the moment and need to consolidate solutions - Orion and vRealize being drastically unutilised.
Well there’s certainly plenty to choose from!
Splunk with the enterprise security add on, Logrhythm, QRadar tend to be the ‘traditional’ type SIEMs, but there’s also the likes of Exabeam in the market now.
As mentioned above they license by user which can make things either cheaper, or just easier to license I guess.
Not really heard or seen much on the product though, interested to hear any feedback from people using it, or having taken a look at it.
Splunk with the enterprise security add on, Logrhythm, QRadar tend to be the ‘traditional’ type SIEMs, but there’s also the likes of Exabeam in the market now.
As mentioned above they license by user which can make things either cheaper, or just easier to license I guess.
Not really heard or seen much on the product though, interested to hear any feedback from people using it, or having taken a look at it.
A lot of the time it depends on who is paying for the tool. If it's the network team, they want to know about packet loss, bandwidth utilisation, switch health etc and buy something strong in those areas. If it's the server team.,.. I'm sure you get the idea
From memory a product like Dynatrace can do some SNMP monitoring of network devices, but as an APM focused tool (transaction tracing etc) I don't believe it's going to compete directly with network focused tools which, for instance, add config management / compliance / reporting. If you want the best of everything, you end up needing multiple tools and joining them together to provide things like service orientated views. Nationwide Building Society have a very impressive Enterprise Command Centre which is built on Dynatrace, SCCM, ServiceNow etc and uses Interlink as a "manager of managers".
Soldato
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PRTG is what I use. It monitors everything in my infrastructure. Switches, routers, firewalls, Hyper-v hosts, SANs and NASs, SQL, IIS, and any windows metric you can think of.
Nate
Nate
A lot of the time it depends on who is paying for the tool. If it's the network team, they want to know about packet loss, bandwidth utilisation, switch health etc and buy something strong in those areas. If it's the server team.,.. I'm sure you get the idea
From memory a product like Dynatrace can do some SNMP monitoring of network devices, but as an APM focused tool (transaction tracing etc) I don't believe it's going to compete directly with network focused tools which, for instance, add config management / compliance / reporting. If you want the best of everything, you end up needing multiple tools and joining them together to provide things like service orientated views. Nationwide Building Society have a very impressive Enterprise Command Centre which is built on Dynatrace, SCCM, ServiceNow etc and uses Interlink as a "manager of managers".
That is an interesting outlook that Nationwide are running, although given most network equipment can only really out SNMP - not sure what dynatrace / newrelic, companies like this are missing out on, that things like Solarwinds can bring to the party. Configuration Managment doesn't fall under monitoring for me - should be under change management and privileged access management to ensure that is looked after. Compliance (patching, firmware, etc) should be dealt with by vulnerability scanner (tenable, et al). Reporting, dashboards, is what I would expect to see from a proper enterprise tool - or output into the 'single pane of glass' if you see fit
Soldato
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The question is what are you monitoring? uptime\availability? patch\vulnerability management? IPS?
I've been putting Azure/Defender ATP through its paces lately and quite frankly it embarrasses a lot of the competition.
Graylog/Zabbix covers our other monitoring needs.
I hate the tools that run off with themselves and monitor all and sundry likes its some beacon of light. (prtg im looking at you! - sorry Nate
) yes its very clever how it autodiscovers half the stuff but I couldn't give a darn for most of it either. id much rather put the effort in and monitor real issues, smtp queue / high sql wait times etc and be notified of that.
I've been putting Azure/Defender ATP through its paces lately and quite frankly it embarrasses a lot of the competition.
Graylog/Zabbix covers our other monitoring needs.
I hate the tools that run off with themselves and monitor all and sundry likes its some beacon of light. (prtg im looking at you! - sorry Nate
) yes its very clever how it autodiscovers half the stuff but I couldn't give a darn for most of it either. id much rather put the effort in and monitor real issues, smtp queue / high sql wait times etc and be notified of that.
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Soldato
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Agree about the Auto-discover, I don't use it for that very reason. Best results with PRTG are obtained when you know what you want to monitor and then implement it yourself. The real fun is creating the fancy dashboards though.
Nate
Nate
So we're a bit further down the timeline, but not really very far on our journey.
We've had the PoV with AppD - yes it's a great APM, but it's only APM and nothing else really. They do have the server monitors but they're limited - no hypervisor etc etc.
Other tools we've looked at so far:
OpsRamp - interesting product...liked the service centric views but no apm at all
Dynatrace - serious product, seems to do more than AppD but also seems to have a lot of useless fluff around it
eG Innovations - looks great for Citrix, although the sales demo was atrocious so didn't sit well with a lot of our team. They also do APM but the demo guy didn't know anything about it really.
ControlUp - great features but is more of a management tool than a monitoring tool
If we had a team to support monitoring I'd probably look at Zabbix but we don't and it seems like it would take a lot of configuration - anyone have an opinion on this?
We are a relatively low-tech internal IT support department:
We've had the PoV with AppD - yes it's a great APM, but it's only APM and nothing else really. They do have the server monitors but they're limited - no hypervisor etc etc.
Other tools we've looked at so far:
OpsRamp - interesting product...liked the service centric views but no apm at all
Dynatrace - serious product, seems to do more than AppD but also seems to have a lot of useless fluff around it
eG Innovations - looks great for Citrix, although the sales demo was atrocious so didn't sit well with a lot of our team. They also do APM but the demo guy didn't know anything about it really.
ControlUp - great features but is more of a management tool than a monitoring tool
If we had a team to support monitoring I'd probably look at Zabbix but we don't and it seems like it would take a lot of configuration - anyone have an opinion on this?
We are a relatively low-tech internal IT support department:
- All applications delivered to users via Citrix
- No cloud services although we do have a few SAAS apps such as iTrent, Salesforce.
- Mulesoft for our ESB (java) - this is the main source of our business transaction monitoring
- Mendix low code development for our customer portals (java)
- Main business application runs on AIX and Progress Openedge database (no expectation to be able to monitor this)
- A few IIS and .net applications
- Microsoft SQL throughout
- ActiveMQ
- SAP
Was it eG themselves who delivered the demo or a partner? I've been involved with a deployment of eG for APM monitoring a .Net (IIS) and SQL application. That's been in production use for a while now. UI isn't super sexy but I've got used to it. That customer is also monitoring a number of Hyper-V nodes (which host the VMs running the app) with the eG agent as well.
eG is perhaps an exception, but in IME lot of the true APM tools like AppDynamics don't extend that well into infrastructure monitoring (eg hypervisor).
It was eG themselves - how is the APM side? The sales guy couldn't even demo it as he hasn't used it before!
Yes you are right about the true APM products lacking infra - this is one reason why I'm not progressing with AppD. I understand that eG come from a Citrix and infrastructure background and have added APM to their product.
Yes you are right about the true APM products lacking infra - this is one reason why I'm not progressing with AppD. I understand that eG come from a Citrix and infrastructure background and have added APM to their product.
Correct on the history of eG.
I speak to a couple of the technical guys at eG quite often and one of them knows the demo platform very well. The .Net / IIS / SQL APM is in production use and we have a case study being prepared for it as the customer loves it. We've also completed an eG POC for APM on an Angular / WebLogic / Oracle DB application - believe we are just waiting for the sign off to get that into production. RUM (Real User Monitoring) is a little limited for SPAs at present but eG have a number of improvements on the roadmap.
BTW, eG will monitor a Progress DB server, though I'm not sure on Progress on AIX support. We're speaking to another potential customer which has OpenEdge currently running on AIX but plans to move it to RHEL. They've not found much to monitor Progress other than the vendor tools which they said are uber expensive.
https://docs.eginnovations.com/Prog...tor_Progress_Database_Using_eG_Enterprise.htm
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Splunk if you can afford it.