The Limitations of Fixed, Manual Thresholding
Thresholds are upper and lower bounds that determine whether a metric is performing to expectation or not. Every time the actual value of the metric falls outside the prescribed limits, the monitoring system raises an alarm.
Typically, administrators have to define the thresholds for each metric collected by a monitoring system. Since there are thousands of metrics for a large infrastructure, manually setting each and every metric can be a laborious, cumbersome process.
For some metrics like availability and response time, administrators can set fixed thresholds, based on their service level expectations and agreements. For other metrics that are not bound by SLAs, the value of these metrics can be time-varying. The number of users connected to a web server is one example. The value of this metric varies with time of day (there are more connections during the day and fewer during the night) and even day of the week. Therefore it is not feasible to have a single, fixed threshold for such time-varying metrics.
eG Enterprise Proactive Alerts greatly simplify monitoring and management of large infrastructures through its three main capabilities.
Intelligent Thresholds
eG Enterprise includes an intelligent thresholding engine, designed to handle both metrics with fixed values and those that vary with time of day. For service quality metrics (e.g., availability, response time), the system allows administrators to set multiple fixed thresholds.
For other metrics, eG Enterprise computes time-varying thresholds automatically. The automatic threshold computation is done using tested statistical quality control techniques to analyze past values of the metrics and to automatically set the upper and lower bounds for each of the metrics, using the historical data. Since the values of the metrics vary from time to time, the historical thresholds are also time-varying.
The key benefits of this approach are:
- Users have the flexibility to choose between fixed and automatic thresholds for each and every metric
- Threshold configuration can be completely automated
- No need for continuous tuning of thresholds as the IT infrastructure evolves
eG’s automatic, time-varying thresholding approach applied to the user connections metric of a web server
Flexible Alarm Policies
Threshold policy determines how the thresholds for a metric are computed, and alarm policies determine when alarms are to be generated to inform administrators about a problem. Depending on their criticality, different metrics may require different alarm policies. Alarm policies also can take into account the frequency of threshold violations of a metric.
Automatic prioritization of alarms depending on their criticality
To accommodate different types of metrics, the eG Alarm Manager offers administrators complete flexibility in setting alarm policies. Administrators can set individual alarm policies for each server, or each server group, or per server type.
Automatic Correlation for True Root-Cause Diagnosis
A single problem can trigger a number of side-effects, potentially triggering a large number of network alarms and difficulty knowing where to begin problem diagnosis.
eG Enterprise provides administrators a head start. The patented event correlation engine embedded in eG Enterprise analyzes the measurements provided to it by eG agents in real-time, assesses the inter-dependencies between infrastructure components, and automatically prioritizes alarms into different levels of criticality. This capability is ideal for multi-domain environments where multiple associates and tools can result in prolonged downtimes and reduced customer satisfaction.
How eG Enterprise performs root cause diagnosis
Key Features of eG Enterprise Proactive Alerts
- Easy to provision - Have the monitoring system up and running in hours, not days
- Allow the monitoring system to automatically learn the baseline performance of the infrastructure and provide alerts when anomalies are detected
- Automatic prioritization of alarms lets administrators focus on the key problems
- Receive personalized, proactive alerts anywhere, at any time via email, text message, or web interface
Benefits: How eG Enterprise Proactive Alerts Enable Fully Proactive Monitoring
- A wide choice of threshold policies - Set fixed, automatic, time-varying, or no thresholds at all to suit existing infrastructure needs
- Flexible, granular alarm policy definitions that can be customized for the target infrastructure, ensuring fewer false alarms
- Out of the box correlation capability focuses administrators' attention on the real cause of problems, avoids them being defocused by the effects of the problems
- Simple to configure correlation engine – requires minutes to configure, not months to customize
- Personalized alerts ensures that administrators only receive alerts pertaining to infrastructure elements in their domain of responsibility
Why eG? One Monitor to Manage All of IT.
- eG Enterprise is the only single pane-of-glass, virtualization-aware, auto-diagnostic IT infrastructure performance monitor
- Gain actionable answers to performance issues, wherever they originate, from application code to bare metal
- Understand the impact of infrastructure issues on application performance and user experience
- Unify IT performance monitoring, alerting, diagnosing, reporting, and capacity planning in a single console
- Ensure a great user experience and dramatically improve IT efficiency
- Benefit from flexible deployment options (on-premises and SaaS) and IT monitoring approaches (agentless and agent-based)
