Free cloud service to monitor the monitors

On-premise monitoring software that fails is not in a position to report on its own failure. By monitoring the health of on-premises services from the cloud, ManageEngineis aiming to provide tools that can ensure the enterprise does not lose the software monitoring tools that are its eyes and ears in maintaining datacentre uptime, infrastructure reliability and performance.

Meeting this objective is why the company has announced the launch of the first free, cloud-based service as part of its Site24x7 suite to monitor traditional on-premise network, system and application monitoring products. Available immediately, this new service enables IT groups to monitor the monitors themselves to make sure the software that companies rely on is working effectively — which is critical for the continuity of operations.

It will be interesting to see how far this trend actually goes over time, for the more businesses get to rely on their applications portfolios, the more they need to ensure they keep working to maintain business continuity, and the more they need to monitor the monitors that are monitoring the monitors.

“Many traditional IT management solutions can monitor your local- and cloud-based assets”

“Many traditional IT management solutions can monitor your local- and cloud-based assets,” said Gibu Mathew, director of product management, Site24x7. “They’re critical to uptime, and we rely on them all the time. But how can we monitor the uptime and integrity of the monitoring products themselves? That’s the job we’ve built our new Site24x7 monitoring service to perform.”

Many organisations try to monitor their monitoring software using homegrown scripts. At regular intervals, these scripts check to see that the management software is running. If it is not, they may try to alert an administrator. But such scripts typically provide very limited functionality and can be difficult to maintain, particularly in a complex environment with multiple management tools.

The company wanted to find a more flexible way to overcome this vulnerability.

The Site27x7 solution is a software agent resident on the servers running a customer’s IT management solution. This monitors, in real time, the uptime of the monitoring system — using port checks, system uptime checks, process uptime checks and more. If a failure is detected in the monitoring software, the software agent reports up to Site24x7 in the cloud, which can immediately alert any individuals that the server owner specifies. This can be done using using a variety of communications, such as SMS, email, mobile push notifications for iPhone/Android, or voice calls.

Because this is a SaaS-delivered service, it can offer users more than just a fault reporting tool. The customer administrator is able, once an alert is received, to interact with Site24x7 in the cloud and take corrective actions through the service, via a mobile phone.

This is a self-configuring service that can cover multiple on-premise monitoring products, including those from HP, Kaseya, Nagios, SolarWinds, Ipswitch and, of course, ManageEngine itself.

Clients taking advantage of this service download and install a lightweight monitoring agent on the servers running their on-premise monitoring software. This agent automatically detects the monitoring product in use and begins monitoring its health. It passes status information to Site24x7 in the cloud using secure, firewall-friendly communications protocols.

IT managers can view system status, percentage of CPU and memory use, thread and handle counts and more — for all their monitored servers — through a single Site24x7 console.

“With this free service expansion, we can help ensure the effectiveness of your traditional monitoring tools and help safeguard your existing investments,” said Mathew. “If your traditional monitoring tools ever go down, Site24x7 will make sure you know about it.”