Say goodbye to log combing and shell scripts
The amount of data generated daily by each runtime in today’s IT landscapes is enormous, and it can be very challenging for the operations team to make sense of it all and draw value from it. Too many applications with different touch points and an increasing number of product installations and their relationships add to the complexity of the IT landscape. However, there is a solution: Unified Operational Intelligence can quickly troubleshoot performance issues, improve customer satisfaction, simplify relationships and streamline systems.
By Logeshwaran Kannan Ponnurangam, Principal Consultant and Venkata Santosh Sajjan Alla, Sr. Consultant, Software AG
Real-time insights into the IT landscape
IT organizations strive to provide the best user experience to support business needs and mainly focus on building fast and scalable applications. Usually less importance is placed on operations and support. In our work as consultants for webMethods, we have seen many system admins and support teams spend an arduous amount of time combing through logs and run shell scripts to understand the root cause of a problem.
What if there was a faster way to help solve this problem… to quickly troubleshoot performance issues, improve customer satisfaction, simplify relationships and streamline systems?
Unified Operational Intelligence was born during Software AG’s WIRED 2018 innovation competition. It uses ELK* (Elastic Search, Logstash & Kibana and FileBeat) along with Software AG Platform Manager (SPM) in a customized framework to correlate the logs emitted by each runtime along with the health statistics collected from SPM APIs from webMethods Integration Server.
Also integrated is Interactive Universal Messaging Monitoring to retrieve real-time statistics of the assets and health of the server. This tool is available to any Software AG customer; it was developed because Universal Messaging Enterprise Manager (EM) is a thick client and does not provide the flexibility to view overall statistics. Rather, you need to go to each and every asset and get the details. EM also does not provide searching and alerting features. Interactive Universal Messaging Monitoring provides lightweight access to view the consolidated statistics and gives you the flexibility of installing in the same way as the Integration Server package.
Another extension of the Unified Operational Intelligence framework correlates the interfaces in webMethods Integration Server written in the Flow language.
The solution provides complete end-to-end visibility in real time across the landscape and helps to gain a better understanding of the system and its logical relationships.
_ Figure 1 : Solution Architecture_
The rich, interactive Unified Operational Intelligence dashboards in Kibana correlate the errors emitted by different runtime components and contain graphics for logging level, memory statistics, response time, running services, running status, CPU statistics, service errors and JVM® threads. You can filter the dashboard with any dimension you need. Based on the selected filter the dashboard will adopt the dimension across the charts. Everything unfolds in real time.
_ Figure 2 : Unified Operational Intelligence Dashboard on Log Levels and Health Statistics_
The relationships between the available runtimes in your landscape can be generated in real time and give a detailed view shown here. The diagram can also be tailored according to your needs.
_ Figure 3 : Relationship Diagram_
Get value out of logs
Unified Operational Intelligence connects the dots between customer experience, application performance and business outcomes by monitoring each application lifecycle and transaction. It enables you to make effective decisions based on intelligent analytics. You can minimize your dependency on experts to understand and resolve the issues.
Unified Operational Intelligence currently supports webMethods Integration Server, Universal Messaging, My webMethods Server and Terracotta. To learn more, email consulting-sales@softwareag.com
* “ELK" is the acronym for three open source projects: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. Elasticsearch is a search and analytics engine. Logstash is a server‑side data processing pipeline that ingests data from multiple sources simultaneously, transforms it, and then sends it to a "stash" like Elasticsearch. Kibana lets users visualize data with charts and graphs in Elasticsearch.
Top comments (1)
nice!!