Use cases
Use Tap In System’s Cloud Management Service to monitor today’s most common IT environments – Linux, Windows, cloud-based, locally hosted. The following user scenario describes how Tap In works with some common IT environments.
- Linux-based infrastructure in the cloud
- Growing IT infrastructure
- Heterogeneous Linux-Windows infrastructure
- Cloud/on-premises mix
Linux-based infrastructure in the cloud
NewCompany.com is launching a new Web site, which will incorporate some Web services provided by partners. They select Amazon Web Services’ EC2 service based on its low cost, fast deployment time and up/down scalability.
NewCompany.com determines that the availability and performance data provided by the EC2 service is insufficient to monitor and optimize its new cloud infrastructure and dependent services. Following a review of various management tools, NewCompany.com decides that the fastest and least expensive way to gain enhanced visibility into its Amazon cloud-based infrastructure is to subscribe to Tap In’s Cloud Management Service. Using Tap In, NewCompany.com can:
- Start monitoring immediately without the cost and hassle of software licenses, hardware, or configuration (Tap In monitoring instances are deployed the same way as any other instance in the cloud)
- Deploy free open source Tap In scripts to monitor cloud services, and free open source Tap In cloud agents to monitor EC2 instances. (Tap In agents perform the same checks as a standard Linux agent, but add EC2 metadata to the events. This allows the operations staff to better correlate monitoring events with the cloud configuration.)
- Monitor its partners’ Web services independently from its own infrastructure, separating NewCompany.com-related availability and performance issues from those of its partners
- Easily accommodate dynamic cloud configuration changes and testing
After subscribing to the Tap In service with a few clicks, NewCompany.com begins to monitor its cloud-based infrastructure immediately. First, the cloud-based Tap In Management Server initiates HTTP checks to simulate user transactions. Agents are installed on all Linux systems to gather basic system metrics – load, memory and disk utilization. Process checks are initiated to ensure each layer’s critical programs are running. A log file monitor on each application identifies and logs any program errors. And a SQL check queries NewCompany.com’s database to ensure its database cluster is responding and performing to spec.
The Tap In Cloud Management Service Viewers (QuickView, Web and desktop widgets) display the utilization of each class of servers even when instances are dynamically added or deleted. If errors are identified, an email notification is sent to NewCompany.com’s systems administrator. Metrics are logged in the Tap In Management Service database. The administrator reviews the Tap In metric graphs daily to ensure component groups are performing within tolerances. If further testing or development of the monitoring service is required, the systems administrator simply runs another monitoring instance for the duration of the test.
Growing IT infrastructure
A year later, NewCompany.com is booming and changes its name to Medium Business, Inc. The company’s growth requires it to add 100 additional servers. To maintain visibility into its growing cloud infrastructure, the systems administrator duplicates the existing agents on the new systems. Since the agents are distributed as open source, no additional purchases are required. However, after evaluating the additional monitoring load (events processed per minute), the company decides to increase its Tap In Cloud Management Service capacity. The company has two options:
- Subscribe to a higher capacity Cloud Management Server instance from Tap In Systems. This is the equivalent of upgrading the hardware, except that customer need only start a higher capacity instance, migrate the configuration to the new instance, and stop the old instance.
- Add another Cloud Management Server instance, and direct the additional load to the new instance. Medium Business can immediately start a new instance and start monitoring.
Heterogeneous Linux-Windows infrastructure
Medium Business continues to expand and opens regional sales offices around the world. These offices each have a Windows Exchange server and sales support applications. The company wants the local IT personnel to maintain these systems.
To monitor the Windows servers using Tap In, the systems administrator downloads free open source Windows monitoring agents from the Tap In Web site and installs them on the remote Exchange servers. The agents gather basic Windows system metrics, and send status events to the Tap In Management Server. Because these agents use Microsoft Powershell, alerts from Exchange, IIS, SQL Server and other Microsoft products are all monitored.
Cloud/on-premises mix
As Medium Business.com continues to grow, it deploys new functionality to its core Web application and elects to host the new modules in a local data center. To monitor the new application modules, Medium Business’s systems administrator uses a specialized tool to capture detailed usage and performance data.
To aggregate all monitoring data into Tap In’s desktop and Web viewing consoles, the administrator uses Tap In’s Perl API to integrate data and alerts from the specialized monitoring tool into the Tap In Management Server. Now the administrator has visibility into all application modules both in the cloud and hosted locally.
