Comprehensive Application Infrastructure Monitoring
vFabric Hyperic, a stand-alone component of the VMware vFabric Application Performance Manager solution, provides a wide range monitoring capabilities for the application infrastructure of custom web applications deployed across physical, virtual and cloud environments. Serving the needs of system admins, application support teams, virtual infrastructure admins, and DBAs, Hyperic’s monitoring capabilities spans the range of 75+ web application technologies, and is delivered in a package that’s easy to install and customize for all your monitoring needs.
Virtualized Application Monitoring
Hyperic lets you understand availability, performance, utilization, events, logs, and changes across every layer of your virtualization stack, from vSphere hypervisor to guest operating system and apps. You can view virtualization topologies for insight into which apps run on which vSphere instances. Hyperic accommodates the constant change and complexity of modern virtualized datacenters, giving you the insight you need at every stage of the path to virtualization: running physical infrastructure only, beginning virtualization pilots, or already running a private or hybrid cloud.
Performance Monitoring
When good performance goes bad, the problem can originate within any one of a number of interacting application and infrastructure components. For example, all app server components may be humming along smoothly, but the network is compromised. Or your e-commerce site may be functioning perfectly, but the authentication server isn’t. In both cases performance will suffer, and the root cause is not easy to diagnose. To cover all the bases, you need multi-pronged monitoring and analysis, and this is exactly what Hyperic provides.
Hyperic groups resources (servers and the software running on them) by application, so you can quickly understand which apps are running slowly, and why. By scannning each app’s underlying infrastructure for possible causes of latency, you can more promptly verify users' performance complaints. It's easy to create dashboard portlets summarizing the performance of all your critical apps, enabling you to see issues before your users do.
While an application-oriented performance view can disclose problems and their likely consequences, it doesn’t provide the information you need to correct them. Hyperic lets you instantly drill down from application views to resource-level performance metrics for hypervisors, operating systems, applications, services, and processes, so you can quickly diagnose the cause of a problem.
Together, Hyperic’s Event Center and Alert Center serve as your early warning system for impending problems. When a breakdown does occur, Hyperic automatically correlates alerts, log events, and configuration changes with performance and availability to help you investigate and troubleshoot.
Demo video: Monitoring in vFabric Hyperic HQ
Event and Log Monitoring
Log files contain the vital clues for diagnosing or averting performance problems across a wide range of application and infrastructure components. The key is getting to the right data quickly. Hyperic speeds analysis and action by arming you with a rich history of log, alert, and security events that are time-correlated with application performance metrics.
Hyperic log tracking lets you manage the continuous inflow of log data: you can define which log events you care about in order to sift out just the entries that matter. Based on your interest in various events, Hyperic can respond with appropriate alerts and control actions.
You can get lost in a sea of files if you don’t know which log entries matter. Hyperic solves this problem by time-correlating log events with performance metrics. For example, Hyperic can show you which log entries occurred at the same time as a spike in CPU or memory usage.
Hyperic lets you designate the log files you want to monitor, choose the level of message to track, and use pattern matching to include or exclude messages. Define alerts to be triggered by log entries. Monitor compliance with security policies by detecting and logging any physical or remote access into any host in your environment. View log events for any resource on its “health page” within the Hyperic user interface. You can view log events across your environment, or for specific resource groups, in the Hyperic Event Center.
Demo video: Events Management with vFabric Hyperic
Configuration Change Monitoring
When an application problem surfaces in production, the first and best resolution step is usually to track down the cause by examining recently changed files. Hyperic provides comprehensive change-detection capabilities across 75 web application technologies and alert you of file changes within minutes. Best of all, Hyperic’s UI superimposes change events on performance graphs, immediately disclosing which changes preceded degradations, and which occurred afterwards and can therefore be ruled out as root causes.
Hyperic monitors configuration files for any resource in your environment and can define alerts to be triggered by changes to those files. As with log events, detected configuration changes are automatically indicated in a resource's health page within the Hyperic user interface. You can also view configuration changes across your environment, or for specific resource groups, in the Hyperic Event Center.
Utilization Monitoring
Learn which applications are running at full capacity and which are idle, in order to redirect budgets and assets toward those that are under-resourced.
Hyperic lets you monitor utilization rates across your application infrastructure, at all levels of your stack, so you can optimize to the fullest extent and then convincingly demonstrate the need for additional resources. Out of the box, Hyperic understands the internals of over 75 products and technologies—exposing highly granular as well as aggregate utilization metrics at multiple levels within the operating system, JVM, application container, web server, database, and messaging tier.
Hyperic automatically captures utilization data and makes it easy to correlate with performance and availability indicators. This takes the guesswork out of mapping the relationship between the resources you have, the load they bear, and the results they yield.
Industry studies show that IT under-utilization is widespread—utilization levels as low as 15 to 20 percent are common. Wherever you are on this scale, Hyperic will help you coax greater value from existing resources: thanks to Hyperic’s deep visibility into actual utilization, you will discover any unused capacity you have. Should your cost-saving and resource optimization strategy include virtualized or cloud environments, you can use Hyperic to manage these too.
If the company is meeting goals and growing the business, your IT infrastructure must grow as well. Hyperic lets you make informed predictions on the timing of resource acquisitions, and back them up with hard historical data and predictive analysis.
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