• LinkServer API for full remote control of AggreGate LinkServer and all connected hardware
• Driver Development Kit (DDK) for creating new LinkServer device drivers
• Plugin SDK for extending LinkServer with new data processing/presentation modules
• Agent SDK for implementing Java-based AggreGate Agents

The SDK will include extensive documentation, examples, and Java source codes for all modules.

Anyway we are currently (re-)documenting AggreGate Network Manager… and an idea emerged: why not to post some of its fresh and hot snippets here? We don’t see any impediments so far! And so here we go… starting with the Network Manager overview.

The major domain of AggreGate Network Manager is an operational aspect of network management: keeping the network (and the services that the network provides) up and running smoothly. The central part here is “monitoring the network to spot problems (outages, failing or slow components) as soon as possible, ideally before users are affected”. Therein AggreGate Network Manager supports network problems detection, prognostication and diagnosing by:

• collecting, storing and processing quantitative characteristics of network parts and components producing source data for analysis tools;
• supporting data visualization and human analysis;
• providing tools to organize highly-customized automatic data processing, important events revealing, and response systems including full-fledged notifications and automatic corrective actions.

As a reaction to a network management event user can (manually or automatically) invoke suitable actions out of the provided by AggreGate Network Manager.

AggreGate Network Manager also provides facilities to organize asset management for hardware and software elements in network environment.

Summing up, AggreGate Network Manager functionally can be classified into few categories as follows.

Configuration

Providing advanced methods and tools for network monitoring, AggreGate Network Manager includes a variety of configuration facilities allowing to form monitoring infrastructure by discovering, adding, and setting up devices to be monitored, as well as configuring monitoring tools, and customizing AggreGate Network Manager Server for better performance.

Network Devices and Application Monitoring

Monitoring can be considered as the most important aspect of AggreGate Network Manager as it concerns nearly all the tasks network administrators meet. Monitoring subsystem of AggreGate Network Manager provides

• collecting various data, including availability and performance metrics, from devices, services and applications, and their resources (CPU, storage, bandwidth etc.)
• important event detection and handling by notifying users, and/or performing automatic corrective actions.

Feedback

Feedback tools represent data and events for users in a convenient (visual, readable, printable) form, allowing them to analyze the situation and react accordingly, or provide automatic action invocation in response. The feedback is provided by generic AggreGate tools like system tree (representing devices, their status and grouping, as well as monitoring tools and server configuration), charts, alerts, reports and queries, and widgets (including specific ones like device maps for geometric and topological network representation). Feedback components can be configured for specific user tasks using standard AggreGate facilities and special configuration tools provided in AggreGate Network Manager.

Standard AggreGate provides a wide choice of actions a user can invoke in response to monitoring event. AggreGate Network Manager add few specific options for network management.

To provide more full-fledged problem-management solution, AggreGate Network Manager can be integrated with virtually any Helpdesk or Trouble Ticketing System.

Asset Management

IT asset management is another typical network management task AggreGate Network Manager also supports. Asset Management plugin allows to associate some asset tracking information with your network devices.

That’s all for today… but coming more soon!

For the purposes of discussion we decompose virtual systems monitoring (as an extremely complex hardware-software solution) into several levels: server level, virtual machine level, and operating system level. In the context of the classification, AggreGate Network Manager provides monitoring at all the levels with both “universal” and specific tools. Namely, at the server level, VMware system (say, VMware ESX) can be abstracted as a conventional (Linux) server and therefore can be monitored with “universal” monitoring tools (providing device availability, performance, applications and services monitoring — we’ll discuss these aspects and tools in our future posts). Similarly at operating system level, virtual system acts as a conventional operating system, and therefore can be monitored using the same approach.

Specific tools are primarily needed for monitoring at the level of particular virtual machines, as this is the place where all the “magic” actually happens. AggreGate Network Manager’s VMware virtual machine monitoring toolset allows to monitor particular virtual machines running on the specified VMware server, and includes:

• VMware Information widget (displaying details about virtual machines registered at a particular VMware Server)
• Alerts:
  • Virtual Machine State
  • Absolute and Relative Memory Utilization
  • CPU Load
  • Disk Read/Write Rates
• Charts:
  • CPU Utilization
  • Disk Performance (in term of read/write operation count or data rate)
  • Memory Usage (both absolute and relative)
  • Network Performance (as packets transmitted/received, or transfer/receive rates)

Note, that the toolset can be customized if necessary, and even extended by creating new tools using the above ones as templates.
AggreGate Network Manager monitors virtual machines running on VMware servers via SNMP, using values in vmTable, cpuTable, memTable, vmwHBATable, and vmwNetTable variables. These variables are automatically set to be periodically synchronized (to provide live refreshing of the values in the tools), and stored (to be available for statistical analysis). The synchronization settings can be adjusted, if needed, for specific tasks using Device Settings Synchronization Options.

A detailed description of AggreGate Network Manager’s VMware monitoring approaches and tools will be available as a part of upcoming release documentation.

Happy Block Chart

We are now integrating a chart library in GUI editor. Almost 20 chart types with hundreds of properties will arrive soon! The combination of new charts with AggreGate’s query and expression languages will bring new data visualization power to the system.