Updated: July 11, 2020 (June 7, 2004)
SidebarThe Need for Monitoring
Nearly all large and mid-size organizations use Unix, Linux, and Windows servers to perform mission-critical functions, meaning outages that could impose significant and immediate financial loss, as well as eventual loss of customer confidence and market share. IT departments need to measure how they are meeting service-level commitments, proactively ward off outages, and respond instantly to problems, preferably before users are even aware they exist.
Complex Solutions to a Complex Problem
Making distributed systems highly available is difficult because of their complexity and interdependencies. For example, a failed domain name system (DNS) server could potentially cripple many other servers and the applications they host. (For more information on high availability, see “‘Five Nines’-Is It Even Possible?” on page 3 of the June 2001 Update.)
To monitor these complex systems effectively, organizations have turned to Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), as well as to comprehensive system-monitoring products available from companies such as BMC (Patrol), Computer Associates (Unicenter), Heroix (Robomon), Hewlett-Packard (OpenView), IBM (Tivoli TME), and NetIQ (AppManager). All provide intelligent software agents that run on each server they monitor and that initiate local actions and forward information, events, and alerts to central gathering systems and consoles. Most of these products can monitor Windows, Unix, and Linux servers, and some can even monitor mainframes and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)-enabled network devices.
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