"Outside In" Infrastructure Management

For 35 years companies have been implementing "inside out" network and infrastructure management. These systems grew from the mainframe days where they were instrumented to be highly tied to the devices they were managing.

They were characterized by:

• Long lead times to instrument
• Long time to value
• Dependencies on the devices they were monitoring

"Inside out" means your monitoring depends on the infrastructure it is monitoring.
All mission-critical systems have had some kind of "outside in" or "out-of-band" management.

Virtualization has become mission critical.

Robert Yellin, Former CTO IBM Tivoli

If the network or operating system is down, the management system is dead.

Agents have to be placed on every device—time consuming, expensive, degrades the network.

Monitoring is done by intermittent polling because the network load cannot bear the network monitor traffic.

Monitors are blind to problems until they are so severe they take down part of the infrastructure. They cannot find the root cause and fix it.

Problem remediation takes much human intervention and long periods of time to resolve.

Virtualized environments cannot be centrally managed—they respond badly to agents.

When there is a problem, a person has to get on a plane to fix it.

This is the world of SNMP and SYSLOG monitoring. Great for the mainframes of the past; not great in the age of virtualization.

"Outside in" infrastructure management is a very different paradigm, being driven by the need to deal with production level virtualization and the advent of the service processor.

"Outside in" means that there is no dependency on the infrastructure being monitored - so if the OS goes down, the hypervisor dies, the machine takes a hit, you can still:

• Manage the INFRASTRUCTURE - not just your network. That means HVAC, PBX system, router and switch infrastructure, Windows, Linux servers - anything that has data
• Manage log files for all managed devices, real time and with remediation built in.
• Find the ROOT CAUSE of the problem — from the outside.
• REMEDIATE THE FAILURE — even with the hypervisor down - according to the best practices of the vendor.
• Manage virtualized environments WITHOUT ANY AGENTS — anywhere.
• Provide PERSISTENT MONITORING - there is no overhead to the network. This enables real time problem resolution.
• TRACK A VIRTUAL APPLICATION, securely wherever it goes — from a central console.
• MANAGE VMware AND XEN and other virtual applications - from a single window.
• Provision virtual and legacy applications in hours, not days, months or years.

And do all this, from a browser, securely and with full audit ability.