Introduction

Filed Under General 

We are happy to announce that several months ago SoftLogica started the development of Server Supervisor product. In short, it will be a server monitoring tool. While we are still working on the GUI design and the exact feature set, we would like to share with you our ideas to hear your comments and suggestions. We will try to take in account all your thoughts, because the more people contribute to the process, the more suitable for their actual needs the product will be.

Before we go to some technical details let me say who will probably need this product and why…

Almost any company has some IT infrastructure with a number of network resources including both external and internal ones. There can be several web servers, data base servers, etc. Usually it is important to guarantee that some essential resources are absolutely reliable and available for employees and/or customers 24/7. If this is the case for some company, then it is likely that sooner or later it will have to face and solve the following three problems.

Fast notification about any problem with a network server resource.
If something goes wrong, the corresponding system administrators should be notified immediately. But the problem will not cry about itself. So, you need to find a way to monitor the availability, performance and correct work of the essential resources permanently.

Resolution of a problem and investigation of its source.
After the notification is received by the proper person, it is crucial to provide a detailed view on the situation, so that the problem can be easily identified and resolved. As soon as it is done, the next step is to make sure that the system has come to its normal state. Finally, the most important question is what was the actual problem? You should find the answer to make sure that it will never take place again. To investigate the problem someone would need to have the ability to view the information about each monitored parameter for any time period in some easily perceivable visual form.

Resource monitoring and management.
Even while everything is working fine and there is no need to mend something immediately, a good system administrator would want to take a view of the situation from time to time. It is a good practice to get a report for last 24 hours daily. Such report would include a summary of the state of the monitored parameters. Another good idea is to get a more strategic view on the evolution of the system and predict its further development. It is better to know about coming problems in advance. You can find system bottlenecks and improve its architecture or make upgrades on time. For this purpose the reports should be generated for any time periods and supplemented with comparison graphs.

Server Supervisor GUI

P.S.: In the next posts I am going to tell what features of our product will help businesses solve each of these problems. I will be really happy to hear any comments from anyone who is familiar with the area or anyone who feels that our new product can be of any use.

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