monitoring

Topology maps and events lists (aka alerts/alarms/notifications) are two most commonly used UI patterns to present monitoring data to users in network monitoring. The usefulness of topology maps is not an agreed upon subject in the network monitoring community. Some folks think maps are "must have" for a monitoring tool, others don't care for them at all.

Most monitoring tools in the market do offer some kind of maps functionality, but the quality varies significantly, not all maps are created equal. I think usefulness of the network topology maps highly depend on the design of the solution. Network monitoring field is full of people scarred by the experience of manually maintaining the hierarchical maps (a la HPOV NNM). I personally think maps indeed can be useful when implemented right, and many people do request it hence we've added Maps to RapidOSS.
Distilling the experiences of the past, we've steered clear of the most common pain points associated with maps. Here is how/why RapidOSS map component is different:  read more »

“Polling” and “listening” are the most common monitoring techniques. Polling is where monitoring systems periodically call monitored systems to check whether the systems is operating as it should, and collect data (performance, etc.).  Listening is where monitoring system waits (listens)  for monitored systems to either directly or indirectly (through other systems, etc.) send information. In network monitoring, monitoring system polling SNMP agent of the devices, etc. is an example of polling technique, and processing of traps and syslog messages are examples of the listening technique.

Heartbeat monitoring is another technique that can be considered an enhanced form of listening. Some systems periodically send information,(events) aka heartbeats, to signal that the system is operating as it should. In this case, the absence of these heartbeat events and not events themselves indicate a problem, hence these events need to be processed differently than typical events.  read more »

In the last couple of posts, I've been looking into potential uses of Smarts dynamic model functional that are simple enough to be used by mere mortals (non-developer) like myself. I've looked at how to add new properties and then how to use events to generate notifications. In this post, I'll go one step further, and take advantage of the propagation between classes.  read more »