VMware, Inc., a provider of enterprise virtualization solutions, is shipping an updated release of its application monitoring product that includes tighter integration with its virtualization server products. The new release, SpringSource Hyperic 4.4, is integration with VMware vCenter Server, and now maintains a continually updated inventory of VMware vSphere ESXi and ESX hosts, the vendor says.
The new release enables IT administrators to more rapidly pinpoint, correct, and prevent application performance problems wherever they occur across physical, virtual, and private cloud infrastructures.
Hyperic picks up application monitoring where the established systems management products leave off, Al Sargent, senior product marketing manager at VMware's SpringSource division, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "The Big 4 systems management products - IBM Tivoli, HP OpenView, BMC Patrol, and CA Unicenter - were initially created in the 80s, a full decade before VMware was founded," he explains. "These products were not designed to accommodate the constant, rapid change inherent in virtualized data centers. But they can't be ripped and replaced. Integrating Hyperic into a Big 4 framework is a solution to that problem. Customers achieve the ability to manage apps running on constantly changing virtualized infrastructure.
Integration between existing systems management products and Hyperic is managed via alert forwarding, implemented via SNMP traps, email messages to a email adaptor, or using the script notification alert mechanism to fire off a script that writes to a log file or makes a web service call, Sargent says.
SpringSource Hyperic, a key element of SpringSource's software suite, supports applications running on both physical and virtual infrastructure. New features include support for more rapid diagnosis of virtualized application performance problems, which enables IT operations teams to use Hyperic to pinpoint the cause of performance issues of applications running on virtualized infrastructure. The new release also provides automatic maintenance of application infrastructure inventory, in which Hyperic automatically discovers ESX hosts, virtual machines, and guest operating systems within minutes of their launch, and presents them in a unified topology so users can see which application components are running on which ESX hosts.
Hyperic also supports applications in non-VMware virtualized environments, such as applications running in a logical partition on System z mainframes, Sargent says. "Assuming the customer is running LPARs, and those logical partitions have Linux, Windows, or AIX on them," says Sargent, "in these cases, we put a Hyperic agent on the logical partition, treat that logical partition as a VM, and have that agent send performance data to the Hyperic server. Once data is in the Hyperic server, it can be viewed by a sysadmins to troubleshoot, fix, and prevent performance problems, used as the basis for alerts to notify of new problems, and to trigger control actions that automatically resolve common systems management issues."
For more details, go here.