{"id":395,"date":"2010-12-05T09:16:25","date_gmt":"2010-12-05T09:16:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eginnovations.com\/blog\/?p=395"},"modified":"2022-08-18T08:34:48","modified_gmt":"2022-08-18T12:34:48","slug":"scalability-metrics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eginnovations.com\/blog\/scalability-metrics\/","title":{"rendered":"Scalability of IT Management Systems"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>How to Measure Scalability of an IT Management System<\/h2>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.eginnovations.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/scalability-management-tool.png\" data-rel=\"lightbox-image-0\" data-rl_title=\"\" data-rl_caption=\"\" title=\"\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-8928 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/www.eginnovations.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/scalability-management-tool.png\" alt=\"Scalability Management Tool\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" border=\"0\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.eginnovations.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/scalability-management-tool.png 300w, https:\/\/www.eginnovations.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/scalability-management-tool-140x93.png 140w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a>I was part of an interesting discussion recently about how one measures the scalability of an IT management system. In the olden days, the focus was on fault management and the big challenge that management systems faced was event storms. In those days, SNMP agents were the primary means of monitoring devices and these agents did not have a lot of intelligence. So when a problem happened, the management system would receive events from all the devices in the network and would have to correlate these events to determine where the problem was. The scalability of the management system was measured by the number of network devices and by the number of events that the management system could process.<\/p>\n<p>Today&#8217;s scenario is very different:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>First of all, management agents have more intelligence built in and since the focus is on outage avoidance (not problem detection), event storms are not common. Well before a user notices a problem, the management system has already alerted the administrator of the problem.<\/li>\n<li>Today&#8217;s management systems also have to handle heterogeneous network, storage, server,\u00a0 application, and virtualized infrastructure elements. A single server may be hosting multiple applications (e.g.,\u00a0 web server, middleware, database all on the same server) that need to be managed. An application may have multiple\u00a0 instances &#8211; e.g., in some of our largest installations, there are tens of Oracle database instances and WebLogic application server instances running on the same server. So scalability cannot be measured just based on the\u00a0 number of physical systems monitored but must also take into account the number of application instances being managed.<\/li>\n<li>Yet another change in today&#8217;s scenario is the high percentage of servers that are virtualized &#8211; so a single server can\u00a0be hosting tens to over a hundred virtual machines. So any definition of management system scalability must also include the number of virtual infrastructure elements being monitored.<\/li>\n<li>Then, the depth of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eginnovations.com\/product\/application-performance-monitoring\">monitoring <\/a>also comes into play. A tool that offers only minimal coverage, collecting 5-10 metrics per application or virtual machine will obviously be able to support more infrastructure elements than another that offers in-depth analysis and metrics for each infrastructure element. The total number of metrics collected by the management system (irrespective of whether these metrics pertain to the network, server, application or virtualization platform) is a better indicator of management system scalability than the number of servers and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eginnovations.com\/blog\/what-is-application-performance-monitoring\/\/\">applications monitored<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Ultimately though, any discussion on scalability has to be tied to the effectiveness of a management system.\u00a0 For example, some management systems are intelligent enough to collect a smaller subset of metrics periodically and to increase the metrics\u00a0collected when something unusual is detected. Should such a solution be regarded as being less scalable than one that collects more metrics all the time? Definitely not.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Hence, if you are evaluating management solutions, don&#8217;t go by any absolute measure of scalability (number of servers, applications, metrics). Consider scalability of the management system in conjunction with the effectiveness of this system and its total cost of ownership!<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How to Measure Scalability of an IT Management System I was part of an interesting discussion recently about how one measures the scalability of an IT management system. In the olden days, the focus was on fault management and the big challenge that management systems faced was event storms. In those days, SNMP agents were [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":8926,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[366],"tags":[182,195,209,212],"class_list":["post-395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-end-to-end-monitoring-e2e","tag-management-system","tag-monitoring-system","tag-performance-management-system","tag-performance-monitoring-system"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v24.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Scalability and IT Management<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Scalability of an IT Management system is critical to monitor and manage a large infrastructure. Learn how to architect IT management systems for scale.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.eginnovations.com\/blog\/scalability-metrics\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Scalability Metrics \u2013 Measuring Scalability | eG Innovations\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Scalability metrics and measuring scalability depends on the effectiveness of your monitoring tools and systems. Find out how to use them to deliver actionable performance information.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.eginnovations.com\/blog\/scalability-metrics\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"eG Innovations\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/eGInnovations\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-12-05T09:16:25+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2022-08-18T12:34:48+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.eginnovations.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/scalability-measureing-tools.png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Srinivas Ramanathan\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:title\" content=\"Scalability Metrics \u2013 Measuring Scalability | eG Innovations\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:description\" content=\"Scalability metrics and measuring scalability depends on the effectiveness of your monitoring tools and systems. 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