jdh's blog

Complexity: basic system monitoring

The other day I had my second contact with a Real Customer, and I learned something.  (Come to think of it, I learned something at my first meeting as well.  This is a trend I'm trying hard to extend by insinuating myself into meetings with customers.)  We have a bunch of really cool systems at Sun -- across a wide range, from high end to low end, covering both SPARC and x64 platforms.  Some customers buy lots and lots of them.  And then want to manage them.

We also have some pretty neat tools for managing and monitoring systems: Sun Management Center  (SunMC) has been around for a number of years, and supports pretty much all of our SPARC platforms.  N1 System Manager  (N1SM) is newer; it was initially targetted for the lower end volume systems, starting with x64 platforms, but has been expanding its focus.  Both tools provide a conduit through which to monitor Sun systems.  Both provide a normalized view, hiding the variations in how those systems report status or generate notifications.  Both also provide upward interfaces to enable integration into 3rd party tools.  In this way we're similar to IBM (Director) or HP (System Insight Manager).

I'd heard that customers aren't always so interested in a 3 tiered management solution, where there is the managed system, an element manager such as N1SM managing the basic hardware infrastructure, and a higher level manager for the data center as a whole.  My main reaction was, those pesky customers, they are never satisfied - this solution is quite sufficient for their needs.

Then in comes the Real Customer, with a big dose of Reality.  It turns out that the second tier running our nifty consolidation layer that knows the special ins and outs of our systems requires some real hardware on which to run.  This isn't just theoritical complexity, this is complexity in terms of additional hardware and software to deploy and manage.

So what should we do?   Provide flexibility.   And that's what we're doing.  We've recently provided some packages that enable direct integration between our systems and third party tools, such as CA Unicenter and MOM.  And this is a trend that we are continuing.   It may not be possible to fully represent some special aspects of our systems through non-Sun tools that focus on enabling management across a wide variety of systems, but we can certainly enable the basic system monitoring and management that is common to all systems.

Posted at 07:36PM Dec 08, 2006 by Julia Harper in Sun  |  Comments[1]