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Unified Monitoring
Unified Monitoring is a comprehensive monitoring approach that consolidates data from various sources, such as servers, network devices, applications, and databases, allowing IT teams to monitor their entire IT environment from a single platform. This holistic approach to monitoring provides real-time visibility into the availability and performance of applications and infrastructure resources, enabling organizations to identify issues quickly and respond proactively.
IT-Conductor can collect data from various resources including:
- Applications - such as application response times, error rates, and resource consumption
- Databases - such as query performance, connections, and storage utilization
- Cloud Services - such as cloud resource utilization, performance, and cloud costs
- Servers - such as CPU utilization, memory utilization, and disk space either on-premises or in the cloud
- Middleware - such as message processing times and integration systems (e.g., MuleSoft and SAP PO)
- Storage Systems - such as storage performance, capacity, and utilization
- Network Devices - such as network traffic, latency, and error rates
- Security Devices - such as security events and threat detection
- End User Devices - such as printer status, request age, and request count
- Web Applications - such as web application performance, page load times, and user interactions
Monitoring becomes effortless by transforming raw data into visually intuitive representations such as graphs, charts, and dashboards. Data visualization distills complex datasets into easily understandable visuals, enhancing the accessibility of information. Trends, patterns, and anomalies become evident, empowering users to identify performance bottlenecks and draw actionable insights quickly.
IT-Conductor simplifies monitoring and troubleshooting through its signature Service Grid, facilitating the seamless association of information on a single pane of glass. This unified view provides a comprehensive snapshot of all your resources, and their relationship in delivering a service, altogether allowing you to observe your entire ecosystem at a glance including service level impacts.
The IT-Conductor Service Grid includes a feature that enables you to display services in warning and higher states. By clicking this button, any components or metrics exceeding defined thresholds will be highlighted across your system landscape. Regardless of the depth of the breached metric, this feature saves you the time of expanding multiple branches or drilling down through several layers of hierarchy before pinpointing the root cause of the problem impacting the overall service health.
Figure 1: IT-Conductor Service Grid
The IT-Conductor Service Grid is designed with expandability in mind, allowing you to explore every component in your ecosystem. You can easily toggle the triangular arrow (►) icon as you drill down to your desired component or make use of the decrease/increase grid depth (<< >>) icon to expand multiple branches at once.
Identifying the root cause of a problem in enterprise environments often involves analyzing the health status, connections, and dependencies between various system components. In this context, correlation plays a significant role in highlighting interactions between different systems and applications, demonstrating how changes in one area can impact others. This multifaceted understanding is crucial for efficient troubleshooting.
The IT-Conductor Health Explorer facilitates the troubleshooting and detecting the root cause of a problem in your system landscape with just a click of a button. It allows navigating through various time intervals and correlating data from different system components to highlight areas causing problems or potential issues. Automating a timeline story of what happened and when, as well as what the causes and effects on services is a significant part of the RCA process.
Figure 2: IT-Conductor Health Explorer
Each monitored system or component has its corresponding monitored metrics. Each metric corresponds to a set of contextualized data points, providing a graphical representation of a metric over a period of time.
You can easily view graphs and charts from the same view in the IT-Conductor Service Grid.
Figure 3: Graphs and Charts in IT-Conductor Service Grid
Note: Contexts can be related or correlated if the data is time-synchronized. If services are comprised of several components, then the data collected from those components should be available in the same time series. See Service Performance Management for more information.
Monitoring an enterprise environment involves a variety of priorities among different teams. What one team deems as critical may not align with the priorities of another, leading to different sets of monitoring focus. In this context, it’s important to emphasize a tailored approach, aligning your monitoring efforts with your team’s specific objectives and ensuring that you concentrate on what truly matters to your unique requirements.
With IT-Conductor Dashboards, you gain the ability to create a customized view that caters precisely to your team's priorities, streamlining the monitoring process and ensuring that you remain focused on the aspects of your ecosystem that are most vital for your objectives. An additional benefit is to turn any dashboard into a report and automate its delivery to recipients providing scheduled snapshots of what users are interested in.
Figure 4: S/4HANA Dashboard in IT-Conductor
Analyzing data for trends and anomalies, and generating reports for historical analysis is a critical aspect of monitoring and management of applications and infrastructure resources. This practice serves as the compass for understanding the evolving landscape of IT, aiding in the early identification of deviations and facilitating strategic planning based on past performance.
Here are the reporting features of IT-Conductor:
- Data Aggregation: Historical data is aggregated over specific time intervals (e.g., daily, weekly, or monthly) to create summarized datasets.
- Report Templates: Report templates are designed to specify the format, structure, and content of the reports. They may include tables, charts, graphs, heat maps, and texts.
- Narrative Context: Reports often include descriptions that provide contexts to the data presented.
- Automation: Reports can be scheduled to be generated and distributed on a regular basis.
- Archiving and Accessibility: Historical reports are archived for reference and compliance purposes. They should be easily accessible to authorized users for future analysis.
In Unified Monitoring, configuring and triggering alerts is a vital component of proactive IT management.
Here's an overview of how IT-Conductor can be used for alerting and notifications:
- Alert Creation: IT teams define specific conditions or thresholds that, when met or exceeded, should trigger an alert. These conditions could be based on various metrics such as CPU usage, memory consumption, response times, error rates, or any other key performance indicators.
- Severity Levels: Alerts are often categorized into different severity levels, such as critical, warning, or informational. This helps prioritize responses based on the urgency of the issue.
- Escalation Policies: Teams establish escalation policies that dictate the sequence of actions to take when an alert is triggered. For instance, if the issue remains unresolved after a certain period, the alert might be escalated to a higher level of support.
- Continuous Monitoring: IT-Conductor continuously monitors the configured metrics and conditions in real-time. If a metric exceeds the configured threshold or condition, the system triggers an alert.
- Event Correlation: Event correlation techniques are used to reduce alert noise. It analyzes multiple metrics and conditions to identify the root cause of a problem and trigger alerts based on the underlying issue, not just individual symptoms.
- Scheduling: You have the option to define the effective start time for generating alerts based on thresholds.
- Notification Channels: IT teams configure notification channels, such as email, SMS, instant messaging, or integration with incident management platforms (e.g. Microsoft Teams Channel, Slack Channel, ITSM ticket desk, etc.) - covered in the Integration section below, to receive alerts.
- Recipient Groups: Notifications can be sent to predefined recipient groups, ensuring that the right individuals or teams are alerted based on the nature and severity of the issue.
- Scheduled Maintenance: IT-Conductor includes features for scheduled maintenance, allowing IT teams to temporarily suppress alerts during planned maintenance windows to avoid unnecessary notifications.
- Alert History: IT-Conductor maintains an alert history, which includes the details of all triggered alerts and their resolutions. This helps IT teams track the incident lifecycle and identify recurring issues.
IT-Conductor integrates with other IT tools to create a seamless and efficient IT management ecosystem. This further optimizes operations and enhances overall productivity.
IT-Conductor can be integrated with incident management platforms, such as Jira Service Desk, Derdack EA, and PagerDuty. When an alert is triggered due to an issue or anomaly, IT-Conductor can automatically create an incident ticket and/or trigger a notification message in the incident management system. This integration streamlines the incident resolution process by ensuring that every detected problem is appropriately logged and tracked in the incident management system.
Explore the following pages to learn more about this integration feature of IT-Conductor:
IT-Conductor can be integrated with collaboration tools, such as Microsoft Teams and Slack. By integrating monitoring with collaboration tools, teams gain the capability to maintain vigilant real-time monitoring and take preemptive action on issues, ultimately fostering a collaborative and adaptable workspace.
Explore the following pages to learn more about this integration feature of IT-Conductor:
The concept of automation in IT-Conductor is built around the utilization of Terraform and Ansible playbooks. These automation tools are seamlessly integrated within the Process Composer in IT-Conductor, developed to cater to different automation scenarios.
Figure 5: IT-Conductor Process Composer
Terraform, known for its infrastructure as code (IaC) capabilities, enables the systematic provisioning and management of cloud resources and infrastructure components. Through IT-Conductor's integration with Terraform, these operations become automated and highly reproducible, ensuring consistency and reliability in complex IT environments.
Ansible, on the other hand, brings its automation prowess to configuration management, orchestration, and application deployment. The utilization of Ansible playbooks within the Process Definitions allows for the efficient execution of tasks, from software updates and configurations to complex workflows, all orchestrated with precision and minimal manual intervention.
This dynamic integration of Terraform and Ansible within the Process Definitions empowers IT-Conductor users to streamline routine and intricate automation tasks. It significantly reduces manual effort, enhances accuracy, and accelerates the execution of critical operations across diverse scenarios, ultimately contributing to the agility and efficiency of IT management.
Last modified 12d ago