Reduce Downtime with up.time

Agreed that downtime cannot be avoided, but it can be reduced by monitoring
network devices regularly. There are several tools and procedures, which can be
used for monitoring and up.time is one such server/client monitoring solution
supporting both agent and agentless monitoring.

It is easy to use and implement, and can monitor network devices through SNMP
(Simple network management protocol). It has support for Windows 2000/2003, AIX,
Linux, Solaris, AIX and FreeBSD 5.x for server monitoring, while for
workstations, it has support for Windows XP, Linux and Solaris. This tool can
monitor Application Servers, Host Services, Windows, Databases and Network
Services. For Application Server monitoring it has default monitors for Exchange
Server such as SMTP local queue length, SMTP bytes sent/received per second,
current SMTP inbound and outbound connections.

Likewise, for database monitoring the tool has support for MySQL, Oracle, SQL
Server and Sybase. It can monitor databases for various parameters such as Total
Transactions persec, Table Space usage, user connections etc. up.time also
supports SNMP monitoring and comes with SNMP MIB Browser and has default
monitors for IIS, WebLogic, WebSphere and ESX v3.

Whenever a failure occurs, up.time immediately sends an alert so you can
handle the problem effectively and resolve it instantly. The alert could be in
the form of an e-mail, SMS, a Windows pop-up message or you can even page it.
The automatic alert escalation system of this utility takes care of an alert
when not addressed within a particular instant of time. Moreover, you get the
liberty to create custom monitors for running custom scripts and generating
specific alerts. In addition, this utility also provides User Access Control,
which lets you create users and assign specific roles as well as access rights
to them.

In Global scan, you can see real time view of all machines being monitored with their trends over the past 24 hours

How to use

We installed up.time on Windows 2003. It took us only 15 minutes to have the
software up, running and start monitoring. When you run it for the first time,
it will ask you to define a password for admin login and provide an e-mail id on
which notifications should be sent. Before you start monitoring, you first need
to configure the Archive policy to define for how long the data should be
monitored. For this go to the menu bar, click on the CONFIG tab and then on
Archive policy, specify the number of months for which you want to keep the
statistics, check the 'Enable Archiving' option and click on 'Set Archive
Policy' button. Now to start monitoring, you need to add
systems/services/network devices that you would like to monitor. For this click
on ' MY ENTERPRISE ' tab in the main Web console of up.time and then select
'Auto-Discovery' option from the pane on left. Now in the display on the same
page provide Network Address and Default SNMP read community fields. In Network
Address field specify the broadcast IP address of the network, in the next field
specify SNMP community string for the SNMP enabled devices present on the
network, and then click on 'Continue' button. It will scan your network and
detect all systems and devices attached. To add a new system to the up.time,
click on the 'Add' button present on the display where name of the detected
machine appears. This opens up the 'Add System' window, here in the 'Type of
System/Device' field select the 'Agent' option if the system that you are adding
runs up.time agent. For agent based monitoring, you have to manually install
agent on the systems you want to monitor and then add those systems to up.time.

You can see performance summary of each machine being monitored through easy to understand graphs

Once you have added machines, you can see them under the Global Scan window.
In Global Scan panel you can see the live summary of systems with details such
as number of recent service outages, CPU usage, hard disk usage, memory usage
etc. To view complete details of the system, click on the name of the system.

For viewing a system's performance in graphs, click on the 'Graphing' option
and then select the component whose graphical details you want to see. For
instance, if you want to view free memory of the machine, go to Memory menu,
select 'Free' option, then choose the time period for which you want to see the
graph, and then click on 'Generate Graph' option. A new window displaying the
details of free memory will open up.

This report shows CPU utilization of all servers across the enterprise and power units consumed by their CPUs

Resource usage reports

You can also use this tool for generating comprehensive reports based on the
data collected over a period of time. To view reports click on the REPORTS tab
and then click on 'Resource Usage' option present under the pane on left. On
right hand side display you have the 'Date and Time Range' option to choose the
period for which you want to generate reports. In the 'Report' option, you can
select reports on CPU Performance, Disk Statistics, TCP Retransmits etc, select
the systems that you want to include in the report, from the List of Entities.

To see the reports right away, click on 'Print to Screen' button present
under the 'Next in Generate Now' option. This will generate the report and
display it in your Web browser. Similarly, you can also create reports in PDF,
XML and e-mail them. If you want to schedule automatic generation of reports
then you have to check the 'Scheduled Report'option and schedule report
generation on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.