FireScope BSM Monitoring Capabilities

With FireScope monitoring every element of their critical applications from the database to application tier to network to workstation, IT professionals gain unparalleled insight into how each link in the chain impacts the overall performance of an application. This level of visibility also enables FireScope to notify clients immediately or initiate automated remediation when configuration errors or events cause even a single, critical aspect or function of an application to fail, and provide administrators with the information they need to quickly perform root-cause analysis and radically reduce mean time to repair.

    Feature Highlight
  • Manage everything from the operating system layer to applications and services, aggregated into service-level views of your entire infrastructure.
  • Collect performance or business outcome data from virtually any application through direct database queries, log file aggregation, WMI, web service calls, web synthetic transactions, or through your own custom methods.
  • Blend application and business metrics with user experience testing to realize a 3-dimensional view of application performance.
  • Be the first to know when IT services are being impacted and quickly isolate the cause to begin remediation before users are impacted.
FireScope as Application Monitor

 

Data Collection Capabilities

Every IT environment is unique, both in the technologies employed as well as security and management processes. FireScope is designed to adapt to any environment by providing a rich menu of data collection methods to ensure that any networked asset from critical applications to infrastructure and environmental elements can be managed and utilized as a source for actionable intelligence. The following outlines the common methods utilized by FireScope to communicate with managed assets. Any combination of methods can be utilized to maximize your data collection options.

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With FireScope, the question isn't 'can you monitor X', but 'how do you want to monitor X'. By embracing open standards and empowering the user with highly intuitive wizards and forms, we make it easy to monitor and manage any application or networked hardware. And with over 60 pre-defined templates covering the most commonly deployed hardware and software, configuration is even faster.

Select a connectivity method to the left for a detailed explanation of how FireScope utilizes this connectivity method.

Simple Checks

The most basic method of data collection, this entails ping testing to verify that an asset is online and verifying that specific ports are responding. While this method only provides on/off status and response time information, simple checks are useful as a quick method for identifying service outages.

SNMP v1, v2 & v3

FireScope supports SNMP v1-3, and includes a MIB Walker to radically simplify asset configuration. While read-only in nature, SNMP provides a moderate level of information detail such as processor utilization, network utilization and error codes. This method is ideal in situations where agents are not allowed to be installed on managed assets, or for collecting data on infrastructure elements such as switches, UPS and HVAC systems.

Syslog

Syslog provides rich event detail information such as security events, error details and audit events, but does not generally provide performance data. When combined with SNMP or other methods to identify performance thresholds, Syslog data can be invaluable in performing root-cause analysis. For organizations currently utilizing Syslog aggregators, FireScope can be configured as a relay agent to allow parallel processing of the data, or as a higher-level aggregator that accepts pre-processed data from existing solutions.

SMTP

Many point solutions utilize SMTP for event and status notifications. FireScope can receive these messages and blend the data within with data received through other methods or assets to correlate across solutions for reduced false-positives.

WMI / Perfmon

Utilizing Windows Management Instrumentation, FireScope can collect detailed information around every aspect of the current health of Microsoft operating systems and critical services, while utilizing perfmon data to help model the trending performance of critical applications and the system itself.

Rather than requiring administrators to log into each system individually to monitor system and application performance, FireScope's WMI and Perfmon connectivity methods enables businesses to have a single dashboard that summarizes all of this information for all critical systems, or utilize FireScope's drag-n-drop report designer to build strategic reports that blend WMI and perfmon data with data collected on other assets.

Web Monitoring

FireScope can simulate the user experience on any web application, perform specific steps to test functionality and collect performance metrics such as response times, download times and alert IT staff when specific steps fail.

This method is especially critical in managing complex web applications that utilize Service Oriented Architectures, SOAP or mashup technologies where a supporting server could be causing isolated pages to fail. Web monitoring is ideal to identifying performance bottlenecks from the userís point of view, which can then be drilled down to identify which specific component is causing the bottleneck for radically improved remediation.

Storage Management Initiative

Using the Storage Management Initiative, FireScope can collect rich information about virtually any server-based volume manager, RAID system or network storage appliance. This enables organizations to consolidate their storage management solutions into their FireScope dashboard, bringing simplicity to a technology that has previously been anything but simple.

Collaboration

An important source of information about an organizations IT infrastructure that is often overlooked is the intuitive knowledge gained by the experts who work on it. FireScope's collaboration suite provides a highly flexible repository for collecting human intelligence and helping to balance the data collected through other menas.

Direct Database Connectivity

FireScope can connect directly to any standard database for critical business metrics such as revenue generation, abandoned shopping carts or leads generated. Each of these metrics can then be setup as a normal configuration item, enabling improved visibility into how IT is supporting the business, notifications when business metrics break pre-determined thresholds, and combined with technology metrics for more accurate strategic analysis.

Rich Agents

FireScope includes rich agents compatible with all commonly deployed operating systems, including all modern versions of Windows, UNIX, Linux, BSD, Solaris and AIX. This method offers the richest volume of data, from platform specific metrics such as page file utilization, to application metrics such as transactions per second or active users.

Additionally, the agent can be easily extended to collect proprietary data from third-party custom applications. Agents also provide the best method for collecting business metrics to improve the value of the technology metrics collected.

Enterprise Service Bus

FireScope BSM includes an Enterprise Service Bus, specifically designed to remove traditional limitations to data collection. Simply define the transport (multicast, web services, direct database connection, ftp, tcp sockets and more) and format of a data source, and the FireScope ESB takes care of the rest, normalizing the raw data in the process for powerful event correlation and analysis possibilities.
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