NeoSpire's monitoring solution takes service monitoring to the next level. Traditional monitoring solutions monitor services to ensure that a server's applications are simply responding to user requests. However, today's complex hosting solutions demand a higher caliber monitoring capability. Critical system resources such as CPU, RAM, and disk usage must be properly monitored. Most importantly a customer's application must be functioning properly. NeoSpire's monitoring solution covers all three key areas from one central monitoring tool.
Service monitoring is the means by which basic services are monitored for operation. An example would be monitoring HTTP (port 80) of a server to ensure that the web server application is running. These tests, however, do not reflect what the web server application is returning. It is entirely possible for a service to be responding properly, but there may be other issues preventing a website from working properly. This is where application monitoring comes into play.
Custom application monitoring is a collaborative effort between NeoSpire and the customer. NeoSpire will consult with a customer to determine how an application works and how NeoSpire can effectively monitor the application.
For example, a typical e-commerce Web site depends on a database back-end. A common problem is the database will become unavailable for some reason. While NeoSpire may be monitoring all the servers and services, a database accidentally set to "Offline" wouldn't trigger an alert. However, with NeoSpire's Application Monitoring the customer could have a Web page designed to simulate user activity. The idea is the page would programmatically simulate all activities associated with a typical user. One of these activities would undoubtedly attempt to update the database. But, since the database was placed "Offline" this part of the code would fail as new data could not be inserted and existing data could not be retrieved. The goal of Application Monitoring is that the customer’s code would detect this problem and generates an error response to be detected by NeoSpire's monitoring system.
There are two benefits to using this type of testing. The first is that it doesn't require the customer to learn anything new. The test page is dependent on using code similar to the existing business logic used throughout the customer's site. The second benefit is that monitoring individual pieces of a system still leaves the possibility of something being missed or overlooked. Testing the end result, the customer's business logic and code, prevents such an oversight.
Monitoring a system's resources is crucial to ensuring that a system doesn't experience a critical shortage of resources. A system short on RAM might still function, but it may be functioning much slower than what is tolerable. Another typical problem is a stray DLLHOST.EXE process on an IIS 5.0 based server may begin to consume all the CPU cycles on a machine. All other monitoring may remain normal but NeoSpire's monitoring system would alert NeoSpire to this problem.
NeoSpire is committed to constant development of modules that are specific to popular server applications. These modules are designed to take the service monitoring component to the next level.
An example is NeoSpire's email relay module. With this module NeoSpire is able to test that a mail server is able to perform the following:
- POP3
- SMTP
- DNS resolution
- Local and remote message delivery
Again, typical monitoring may be able to test the first two items but the remaining items are only testable if the entire mail send/receive process is tested. Also, any in-between components such as network, spam/anti-virus filtering software, etc are also tested. Again, this in-depth testing allows NeoSpire to be confident that a customer's entire solution is working, not just the pieces.
Some of NeoSpire's application monitoring modules include:
- Microsoft SQL Server 2000
- MySQL
- Microsoft Exchange 2000
- J2EE Environments
- Microsoft ASP/ODBC
- Microsoft .NET
- Macromedia ColdFusion 5 and MX
- Oracle 8, 9, 10
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