Introduction

With increasing demand for 24/7 availability, support and manageability comes the need for cost effective solution. Clustering is one of the methods used by datacenters, which focuses on HA and manageability. Looking forward to management and automation of  administrative tasks of data centers with several servers in network environment, increasing reliability improve performance make operations more efficient, by  reducing deployment and provisioning time.

Datacenter Infrastructure Monitoring

Monitor and manage Datacenter infrastructure, i.e. Servers, Applications or network.  Gain insight into the status and performance. Detect and address issues before they affect customers or users. Minimize the total cost and complexity of management.

Architecture and Design

Among Key factors are Availability and Scalability. In addition, Analyze and monitor the functioning and the performance of the server farm.

Availability: Avoiding a single point of failure and achieving fast and predictable convergence times.

Scalability: Allowing changes and additions without major changes to the infrastructure, easily adding new services, and providing support.

 Key Factors:

·        Open Source Architecture.

·        Monitor and manageability. 

·        Status and performance management.

·        Prediction and Troubleshooting.

·        Reporting Trend and Statistics.

Software Recommendations

 This section summarizes the recommended software for implementing data center Monitoring System. Most of the Software’s are Open Source, GPL which runs on Linux OS.

GroundWork Monitor Open Source provides coverage for the widest range of servers, operating systems, routers, and other devices, to offer complete visibility and control of a company’s entire network infrastructure. With real time status views, historic trend reporting and a sophisticated alerting system, system administrators can proactively manage and control their IT infrastructure, significantly improving uptime and performance.

Nagios is a system and network monitoring application. It watches hosts and services that you specify, alerting you when things go bad and when they get better. 

Key features:

·        Monitoring of network services (SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, PING, etc.)

·        Monitoring of host resources (processor load, disk usage, etc.)

·        Parallelized service checks

·        Contact notifications when service or host problems occur and get resolved (via email, pager, or user-defined method)

·        Ability to define event handlers to be run during service or host events for proactive problem resolution

·        Automatic log file rotation

·        Support for implementing redundant monitoring hosts

·        Allows you to schedule periods of planned downtime for hosts and service that you’re monitoring.

·        Web interface for viewing current status, notification and problem history, log file, etc.

ZABBIX is software for monitoring of your applications, network and servers. ZABBIX supports both polling and trapping techniques to collect data from monitored hosts. A flexible notification mechanism allows easy and quickly configure different types of notifications for pre-defined events.

ZABBIX offers functionality that will make your IT resources look more transparent, and it will also help to easily identify performance and availability problems. ZABBIX greatly increases the productivity of system administrators by providing simple-to-use monitoring system.

Key features:

·        Runs on AIX, FreeBSD, Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Tru64/OSF

·        SQL database for storing configuration, collected data and trends

·        Web interface offers minimal learning, ubiquitous access

·        Instant drill down from real-time status of IT Services to historical trend and statistics

·        Data visualisation and mapping

·        High performance native ZABBIX agents for performance and integrity monitoring for virtually all platforms (UNIX, Win32)

·        Monitoring of "agentless" environments

Nagios & openQRM

Nagios and openQRM  integrate seamlessly with the use of the "Nagios plug-in for openQRM" to automate responses to Nagios events and alerts that previously required manual intervention.

Vertualisation

 openQRM is an open source systems management platform which integrates with existing components in enterprise data centers to create scalable, highly available and customizable infrastructures. Architecture extends to and embraces other existing data center technologies through “plug-ins.” number of plug-ins are available for broadly-used open source projects and proprietary solutions. Provide a enterprise-grade project for automating infrastructure, and by embracing other technologies through increasing our offering of plug-ins.