It sounds to me like you're describing Business Service Management
(BSM). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Service_Management
Infrastructure monitoring is the base for BSM, you aggregate network/
system information upwards and start thinking about whole systems
rather than the machines that make them up. In Zenoss' case, you
would start approaching this with event correlation and consolidating
events from multiple systems into single events. For example, you
might have a web server farm and the CTO might not really care if 1 of
20 machines goes down because the website is still functional, but the
IT admin would. You could set up alerting at different levels for
escalation, for when that error condition moves from an IT issue to a
business issue.
Thanks,
Matt Ray
Zenoss Community Manager
community.zenoss.com
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Aug 27, 2008, at 3:00 PM, dyerfr wrote:
Hey all - I receieved information about Zenoss via an open posting
on metafilter. First, a caveat: I am a marketing/product development
guy, not a technical person, so please excuse any missteps I may
make w/respect to functionality and application.
One of the new products I am developing for my company involves a
software program that is used to enable our core business - the
current scope of the project is basically a refresh of the somewhat
limited functionality we currently have into a current software
language.
However, we are looking at potential enhancements to this software;
one of the thoughts/concepts we have had (and that's all it is at
the moment) is to better enable our software and systems/hardware to
'play nice' with other programs and systems in our customer's
environment.
Most of the applications of solutions like Zeenoss that I have seen
have been IT-heavy; that is, they are designed to be installed,
used, mangaged, etc. by people who are looking at IT systems:
network health, connectivity, hard drive or CPU utilization, etc. I
am looking at the potential of a system that takes the same concept,
but abstracts away the presumption that the user or the 'systems'
being monitored relate to or are concerned with network monitoring.
Below is the text of my post to ask.metafilter,com:
Here's what I am looking for... a software package (to be integrated
with my company's software) that, either via push or pull, collects
information (likely quantifiable numerical data, but not
necessarily) from other systems deployed at a customer site. We
could define the package I am looking for as a 'central' system and
the others as 'input' systems.
The central system would then, based on user-definable metrics,
invoke actions (e-mails, pager alerts, etc) when measurements/
thresholds from the input systems reach a certain level - the rub is
that it (the threshold) would often be based on a combination of
inputs from more than one system.
Easy (potentially nonsensical) example: there's a thermostat and a
humidity detector in a rooom - each has a 'system' attached to it
that monitors the temperature and the humidity. Those individual
systems could easily tell me when the temperature reaches X OR the
humidity leve reaches Y, respectively. But what I am looking for is
central a system that would tell me when both events occur at the
same time - that is, when the temperature reaches X AND the humidity
reaches Y - something that each individual input system cannot do.
This central system I am referring to could allow the user to define
what X and Y (and Z, etc) would need to be and how often the
threshold would need to be reached over a given time period - that
is, the user defines what is important and how he wants to be
alerted. To continue the example above, maybe the user is only
interested if the conditions are met twice in a 24 hour period, and
so the central system would only define an 'action' when the
condition(s) is/are met a second time in the past 24 hours...
(back to Zenoss forum...) How applicable would a solution like
Zenoss be for an implementation 'outside' of the IT realm? Do any of
the members of this forum have examples along the lines of what I
described above? Is it too abstract to comment on? My engineers/IT
folks here at my company are sort of scratching their heads when I
use examples like above...
In an attempt to add a few details... imagine an environment with
access control (online locks), point of sale systems, energy
management systems, PBX system, reservation systems, etc. These
might be some of the 'input systems' that would connect to the
central system I am describing.
Thanks in advance for any input or advice... I am still fishing at
this point!
-------------------- m2f --------------------
Read this topic online here:
http://community.zenoss.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=24340#24340
-------------------- m2f --------------------
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