Intellinger UPM Unified Performance Monitoring

Intellinger Unified Performance Monitoring (UPM) allows any size enterprise to collect performance data from all layers of their system environment. UPM users also enjoy improved system performance and availability by receiving pro-active alerts to potential bottlenecks and critical errors in their environment via email, pager, and SMS. Intellinger understands that IT professionals today are increasingly supporting diverse and widely distributed environments - UPM was engineered using pure Java and the latest in web services technology to provide true enterprise-wide performance monitoring in a single application.

• New Database Monitoring module
• Updated License management functionality via the UPM console
• Real-time log viewer in the Control Panel
• Improved UPM console performance and consistency
• HTML User manual
• New help functionality in UPM Console
• Increased Custom Agent functionality in Aggregator
• Enabled collection of internal UPM and Brazil metrics
• Java API for Java developers

The big deal in this release is the addition of our database metrics which allow you to connect to a database via JDBC and run an SQL statement right from the UPM console. This gives UPM users the ability to quickly and easily collect and report on internal database metrics as well as data from within their database (without the need of the Custom Agent).

1. Back End: components within this zone are responsible for the collection of data from the customer’s environment and propagating that information to the data repository. Should the collected data be outside of defined operational parameters, or if a mandatory metric has not been collected, an alert is generated. Likewise, if a network service is shown to be malfunctioning, an alert is generated.
2. Data Repository: Intellinger UPM includes an OEM license of IBM’s “Cloudscape”, a small footprint, standards-based Java database, where the collected data metrics are stored. The UPM system configuration data also resides within the database repository.
3. Presentation: The presentation zone is the User Interface for performing system configuration and creating and viewing reports and performance dashboards. UPM customers can also choose to use a command-line interface in place of, or in addition to the graphical user interface.

SNMP Client

SNMP is a protocol that was developed to report performance metrics and also to remotely control devices. Many different clients support SNMP, and for some (such as network devices), it is the only available means of collecting data. SNMP is very rigidly defined and is rather difficult to customize. A number of operating systems come with default SNMP interfaces or definitions (called MIBs) that can be easily enabled and configured to use with UPM.

UPM Client

For system components that don’t support SNMP, or for any customization that may be required where it is not reasonable to encapsulate the information into SNMP, UPM uses a custom Java client. This involves writing data of one sort or another to a text-based log file in a specific format. The Java client then collects that data and sends it to the Aggregator. This log file can be the output of an OS shell script, a Perl script, a native C/C++ program, a database procedure or function, etc. This makes it very flexible and allows for the easy integration with any pre-existing administrative reporting tools that may be currently used.

Aggregator

The Aggregator has two distinct roles: the active instigator of the “send me an SNMP value” request to the SNMP clients; and as a passive listener for the reception of data being sent by the UPM Client. The Aggregator checks the values of the data metrics collected and determines whether the value presented for a given metric falls within defined operational parameters. If the value of the data metric is outside of the acceptable range an alert is sent to whichever Claxon the Aggregator is configured to use. The aggregator then transmits the data to the Master Node.

Master Node

The Master Node is the heart of UPM. All configuration and security data entered via the Presentation Components is transferred to the other Data Collection Components from the X-CONF Database via the Master Node. The data metrics collected by the Back End Components are also forwarded to the Database Repository via the Master Node.

Service Monitor

The Service Monitor checks the operation of outward-facing services such as FTP, SMTP, HTTP and HTTPS. If a service is malfunctioning an alert is sent to whichever Claxon the Service Monitor is configured to use.

X-CONF Database

All of the UPM system configuration data is stored within the X-CONF Database.

Database Repository

This is where all the performance data is stored. A large amount of physical storage space would be required in order to store every event for every machine for a long period of time, so the information is stored in a series of averaged time segments. Real time, detailed event information is kept for a configurable amount of time (such as for a one or 2 hour period). As time goes on, the data is averaged into longer, configurable reporting periods. The default (but configurable) settings result in reporting periods of 1 hour, 12 hours, 24 hours, 1 week, 1 month, and yearly averages.

Data Processor

The data processor is where the unprocessed data is received, stored, and subsequently transferred to the appropriate aggregation tables within the Data Repository.

Claxon

The Claxon is nothing more than an alarming module. It takes an alarm notification from either the Aggregator or Service Monitor, and sends emails to the appropriate individuals alerting them to the problem. It also keeps logs of what alarms were sent out, to whom, and when.

UI

UPM users can select either a graphical user interface or command-line interface to configure UPM or to create custom reports or performance dashboards.