Comparing eG Enterprise with Public Domain Linux Monitoring Packages

Server Hardware Monitor

System Monitor

Microsoft Windows Monitor

AIX Monitor

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The table below summarizes how eG Enterprise offers value-added monitoring beyond what freeware monitoring software can provide for Linux monitoring.

	Freeware	eG Enterprise
Operating system monitoring	Focus on providing key operating system metrics - for CPU, memory, disk and network. Often involves a different set of scripts for each Unix operating system type.	Provides comprehensive metrics regarding the performance of the operating system. The same agent can be deployed on each Linux OS (independent of the operating system type).
Server hardware monitoring	Often not included.	Out of the box integration with common hardware monitoring tools - HP Insight, IBM Director, Dell OpenManage.
Agent-based and agentless monitoring capability	Yes	Yes
Detailed diagnosis information	No	Top 10 processes by CPU, memory, disk usage. Historical information is stored so administrators can perform post mortem analysis.
Baselining of the servers	Thresholds for metrics have to be manually set based on administrator's expertise. Is a time consuming, laborious process.	Thresholds for metrics set either based on industry standard best practices or auto-learned by the agents based on past performance of the servers. Little or no human intervention is necessary.
In-depth application monitoring	Available. Focus is on collecting hundreds of metrics based on public domain scripts.	Available. Includes best of breed monitoring for critical business applications - both public domain and commercial applications.
Correlation of performance across tiers	No	A key value add of eG Enterprise is its ability to correlate performance - between the network, the operating system and the applications. Using this capability, eG Enterprise can quickly pin-point the exact layer at which a problem is being caused. Early and accurate detection of problems helps you detect problems proactively and to avert catastrophic failures in the future.
Advanced reporting	Limited to time of day graphs that show metric values over time.	Includes comprehensive reports tailored to the specific needs of executives and operations personnel. A variety of pre-canned and customizable reports including trending reports, capacity reports, and snapshot reports are included.

Multi-tier IT infrastructures are a nightmare to troubleshoot because of the dependencies that exist between application tiers. For instance, a failure in the database tier could result in slow downs in the application and web server tiers. Hence, monitoring solutions that view the infrastructure as independent silos cannot effectively monitor and diagnose problems in such infrastructures. The addition of virtualization to such infrastructures makes monitoring and management of these infrastructures even more challenging!

Fig 1: A problem in one application can affect all the other applications involved in the service delivery.

Fig 2: Excessive disk reads by the media server slow down Oracle database accesses

Since a single VMware^® ESX/ESXi Server is used to host multiple virtual machines (VMs), a single malfunctioning application on a VM can degrade the performance seen by applications hosted on the other VMs. Figures 1 and 2 illustrate such an example. In this scenario, users are experiencing slowness in their access to a web-based service. From the service topology, it is clear that the database server is the cause of the slowdown. Figure 2 illustrates that since the database server is hosted on the same ESX/ESXi server as a media server, high I/O activity due to increased access to the media server is resulting in the database server seeing slow disk accesses. To accurately diagnose the problem in this example, a monitoring solution must not only consider the inter-dependencies between applications that are involved in service delivery, but it must also consider the existential relationships between applications, virtual machines, and physical machines. Besides resource contention among guest virtual machines, applications executing on the ESX/ESXi service console can also affect the performance of the virtual infrastructure.

While knowing which VM is consuming excessive resources is helpful, it is even more important to understand whether the VM's behavior is normal. For instance, a memory leak in one of the applications executing inside a VM may be causing the VM's memory usage to increase over time. In such cases, it is essential that the monitoring solution be able to look in-depth into each guest VM and detect abnormalities. While deploying individual agents inside each VM provides this level of visibility, this can result in additional resource overhead, licensing fees, and maintenance cost.

Performance degradations in a virtual infrastructure may also be because a virtual machine has not been configured with sufficient resources to handle its workload. A monitoring solution must be able to differentiate problems resulting from inadequate virtual machine configuration and those resulting from hot-spots created by uneven distribution of load across ESX/ESXi servers.


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