VMware vFabric ^TMHyperic®

Today’s web apps depend on many interrelated software components and servers, usually administered by a range of IT staff—sys admins, virtual infrastructure admins, database admins, and more. Each specialist requires a set of alerts geared to specific concerns. Similarly, business-side “application owners” need to track app compliance with service-level commitments, but don’t want to be inundated with alerts on minor issues. Lastly, application team members are often dispersed nationwide or even globally.  Sys admins don’t have the bandwidth to watch everything at all times and manually email colleagues whenever something goes wrong.

vFabric Hyperic is the solution for all your alerting challenges. It equips you with an early warning system for prevention, damage control, and resolution, helping to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.

Hyperic’s role-based alerting makes it easy to send component-specific notifications to diverse teams within your organization. Follow-the-sun alert schedules let you appropriately time and sequence messages to geographically distributed staff tasked with keeping apps running 24x7. Should an alert go unanswered or an outage persist, Hyperic's escalation workflows ensure that other colleagues in the chain are notified and appropriate actions can be initiated.

Hyperic includes capabilities to assure that notifications are significant and actionable. Group-based alerting lets you monitor and respond according to aggregate availability and performance—for a cluster of app servers, or all servers used by a particular application, etc.—to avoid deluging people with overly granular messages. You can create multi-conditional alerts to assure that notifications signal real problems, and specify when Hyperic should send an “all clear” message indicating that service levels have been restored.

Hyperic lets you trigger alerts based on:

• A single resource, group of resources, all resources of the same type, or an application
• Metric thresholds: absolute value, percentage value, and comparison to baseline
• Inventory property changes, configuration changes, and log events

In addition, you can automatically:

• Notify an individual or a group by email or SMS
• Automate a response that solves a problem or prevents downstream consequences, such as virtual machine rollback or restart, service restart, JVM garbage collection, or database vacuuming
• Issue a problem ticket via a helpdesk system
• Send a problem report to another management system
• Run a script that performs any set of steps you wish