The present invention relates to monitoring and managing assets, applications and services.
Prior to the present invention, if an application that involved several or many infrastructure components (e.g., databases, servers etc.) was experiencing a performance problem, the persons in charge of each infrastructure component would need to be consulted in an attempt to identify the source of the problem. Each such person would be required to review his or her system to determine if it were the source of the problem. This process is very inefficient and a great deal of time was consumed attempting to identify the source of the problem. This highly manual process involved collecting data across many infrastructure silos, aggregating it and correlating it in such a way to identify the issue. The prior art processes allowed for minimum operational transparency.
In addition, there are many tools that must be consulted to collect the data required to identify the problem. The sheer number of tools available makes it difficult to know which tool to use. In addition, each of the tools involves different display screens with different layouts and usage directions. No unifying concept exists in the prior art that ties all the tools together.
Operators assigned to these tools would receive an alert on his/her console and follow standard operating procedures in an attempt to resolve the problem. However, persons other than operators, such as application developers and key stakeholders in the application, have an interest being informed of events and alerts. Rolling out consoles to all application developers and key stakeholders presents a challenge, both in terms of the number of consoles that would be required and training involved for each console.
The present invention resolves the problems left unaddressed by prior art systems and methods.
The present invention is directed to a system and method for monitoring and managing applications and services. A repository comprising information identifying a plurality of assets and one or more relationships among the assets is maintained. One or more assets used to support an application are identified, along with one or more applications that are included in a service. Event and performance data is collected by a plurality of tools that perform monitoring and/or managing of the identified assets, the application, and/or the service. The event and performance data is aggregated. The user is provided with a portal to access the aggregated event and performance data. Through this portal, the user can determine an impact of an event or a performance issue on the application or service based on the aggregated event or performance data and the relationships among the assets.
It is to be understood that both the foregoing general description and the following detailed description are exemplary and explanatory and are intended to provide further explanation of the invention as claimed.
The accompanying drawings, which are included to provide further understanding of the invention and are incorporated in and constitute a part of this specification, illustrate embodiments of the invention and, together with the description, serve to explain the principles of the invention.
In the drawings:
The present invention provides a tool that allows users to monitor and manage assets, such as servers (e.g., web servers, application servers), people, routers, databases, and other applications, that are used to support applications, as well as the applications themselves and services comprised of the applications. The invention provides all interested parties, including operators, application owners and key stakeholders, transparency into applications. Information regarding an application necessary to support best practices is aggregated from a variety of sources and delivered to the user via a single user interface. The invention allows for increased business continuity planning by allowing application owners and stakeholders to see what servers, databases and other infrastructure components are in use, determine which have manual or automatic fail overs and identify the dependencies of applications and services.
In order to use the inventive portal, application owners must model their applications by identifying the owners and assigning dependencies (such as servers, databases, web servers, application servers, etc.) to their applications. This information is stored in a repository, which can then be searched for information on a particular asset. Users can get a fuller view of the details associated with the application. By drilling down, users can obtain more detailed information, such as alerts and notifications about the performance of the application. In addition, users are able to monitor, in real-time, network activity and database activity, as well as view incident reports.
With reference to
Data collected in tier 101 is then pulled into tier 102, using an enterprise system management tool 1021 that provides the framework for reporting events, and aggregated. The application instrumentation will need to be pulled in off the adapter (e.g., Hawk Display Adapter and Hawk/SNMP Adapter shown), but domain specific management components can be pulled directly from the user interfaces of the components. A user can make a request directly to one of the components and obtain data without need for configuration information. In a preferred embodiment, Hewlett Packard Open View (“HPOV”) is used, although other similar tools can be used within the scope of the present invention. An asset repository 1022 includes meta data records for the infrastructure components and applications monitored by the tools in tier 101, including information regarding relationships among and between the components and the applications. This allows for viewing and modeling of the dependencies between infrastructure components and applications, as well as their interaction points. Thus, if a problem were to arise, the impact of the problem could be determined easily.
The aggregated data is then transmitted through the user interface and transport components of tier 103, to the delivery platform of tier 104, where the data is presented to the user. User interface components 1031 of tier 103 allow for aggregating data in different formats and from different sources, normalizing the data, and rendering it in a generic fashion to the user without having to build an interface for each of the domain specific management components.
The ability to aggregate data collected from many different silos, and model dependency viewers, allows for proactive solutions to problems arising in applications. Thus, as is discussed in more detail below with reference to
An exemplary user interface of the delivery platform of tier 104 is described with reference to
The “My Assets” area 208 allows the user to edit and view his application information and dependencies, and to personalize his view. In a preferred embodiment, the view shown is user-sensitive, meaning that information relating to applications that the user is interested in and entitled to learn about are shown. In this way, the invention uses the concepts of entitlement, authorization and authentication and is implemented using profile information for each user stored in asset repository 1022.
A color-coded alert count bar 207 informs the user of the number of alerts in each category of severity.
Clicking on an entry in console manager area 201 will allow the user to view more details regarding the event. With reference to
Using dependency tree button 305 in metrics area 302, a dependency tree 401, shown in
Still further detail of the assets can be accessed using the present invention. With reference to
With reference to
Depicting the infrastructure and alerts in this manner provides many advantages. The user can identify problems quickly and determine the impact of the problem. Not only is the invention useful for day-to-day operational aspects of a system, but it can also be used to determine, e.g., whether a company is fully leveraging its infrastructure and how much infrastructure to plan for in the future.
With reference to
In step 805, the collected event and performance data is aggregated. This is accomplished via an adapter approach where the enterprise management frameworks of the middle tier 102 (of
In step 806, a portal is provided to a user which allows the user to access the aggregated event and performance data, thereby allowing the user to determine an impact of an event or a performance issue on the application or service based on the aggregated event or performance data and the relationships among the assets.
With reference to
The present invention is intended to embrace all alternatives, modifications and variances that fall within the scope of the appended claims.
This application is a continuation application of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/924,572, filed Aug. 24, 2004, which claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 60/576,200, filed on Jun. 2, 2004, which are hereby incorporated by reference.
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Number | Date | Country | |
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Number | Date | Country | |
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Parent | 10924572 | Aug 2004 | US |
Child | 12007355 | US |