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Monitoring non-Cisco devices
2008-06-03 18:04:00
June 3, 2008 Q: Longitude has a built-in solution for monitoring Cisco network devices. Can Longitude monitor non-Cisco network devices? A: Yes. Longitude’s built-in Cisco solution uses a standard RFC1213 MIB for data collection, so in many cases, you can use it to monitor non-Cisco devices out of the box. The Cisco solution proactively monitors key performance metrics including bandwidth utilization, IP packet errors, TCP errors, TCP retransmits, UDP errors, queue lengths, etc. Longitude alerts you when there is a problem, and also provides pre-configured, on-demand reports and graphs to help you understand performance trends and ensure maximum availability. For more information about built-in monitoring of Cisco and other network devices, please consult the Data Sheet for the Cisco Solution (http://www.heroix.com/downloads/pdf/Long itude_Network.pdf). If you wish to monitor items not collected by the built-in solution, then Longitude’s SNMP Studio enables you to monitor any SNM...
More About: Devices , Monitoring

Managing Longitude Database Size
2008-03-25 16:59:00
March 25, 2008 Q: How do I manage the size and disk usage of the Longitude database? A: Longitude uses an open source SAP database, which is automatically created with 3 GB allocated on the drive you choose when you install Longitude. The database will auto-expand on that drive when it reaches either 80% full or less than 100MB free. You can manually extend it on the same drive, but that is rarely needed given Longitude’s self-maintaining features. Do not gauge database consumption based on what Windows shows as the size of the Longitudesapdbindep_datawrkFZEDB1DATA0001 file. Even if Windows shows that file at 3 GB, the database is not necessarily nearing the full 3 GB allocated. You can check the consumption by logging into the WebDbm: http://localhost:7230/webdbm u: dbm p: {the password you specified for the original Longitude user during installation} See the screen shot below. Posted by Greg Savas, Technical Support Engineer 
More About: Database , Size

End User Experience - The Elusive Independent Variable
2008-02-11 22:08:00
February 11, 2008 While it’s intuitive that end user experience is the most accurate measure of the quality and reliability of IT services, it’s often much less clear how to measure it. Moreover, there is no standard template for integrating an evaluation of user experience into the myriad of other objects monitored and measured. The process can be quite simple though in a scientific context. The goal is to build a picture of cause and effect in our environment that employs end user experience as the overall barometer of application performance and links it to all the potential service delivery problems. In statistical terms the end user experience is our Independent Variable. All the other things that can go wrong are our Dependent Variables, such as a system going down, running out of space, no response from web server or DB, network connectivity issues, etc. Ideally, we want to build a visualization of Independent and Dependent variables together, so that we immediately...
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Details on Longitude Packages & Upgrades
2008-01-17 21:52:00
January 17, 2008 As you may have read in our recent press announcement, Heroix has released two new Longitude versions. Some have asked what this means for the “old” Heroix Longitude, so I thought I’d offer a little background on each package. The software we know as Heroix Longitude is still alive and well, and is now called Longitude Enterprise Edition, reflecting its full coverage of application performance and network monitoring, with advanced features that facilitate IT monitoring and management in large enterprises. The two new versions – Longitude Standard Edition and Longitude Professional Edition – consist of selected features packaged and priced to meet the needs of smaller and mid-sized businesses. Longitude Standard Edition provides out-of-the-box operating system and IT infrastructure monitoring that’s affordable for small to medium businesses; it covers Windows (including Server, XP, and Vista), RedHat and SuSE Linux, AIX, HP-UX, Sun Solaris, VMware ESX, Ci...
More About: Upgrades , Details , Ages

Application performance and network monitoring for every budget
2007-12-28 21:39:00
December 28, 2007 - Thoughts for the New Year Although a good 80% of the optimism expressed this time of year inevitably seems like New Year’s hype, I can honestly say that we are excited about what 2008 holds for Heroix. Having been in the performance monitoring software space as long as we have, we have seen many changes over the years – from the early days when it was enough to keep an eye on basic system performance – disk space, CPU time, and batch and print queues – to today’s standard of multiplatform application performance and network monitoring. Amid all the mergers, acquisitions and fadeouts in our industry, Heroix has remained a player because we do three things: we deliver a robust product, we take care of our customers, and we adapt to change. It’s that last point – adapting to change – that has energized Heroix for the New Year. As we’ve seen IT organizations’ monitoring needs grow from simple system monitoring to encompass applications, service l...
More About: Performance , Network , Budget , Application , Monitoring

Network Monitoring: Longitude Saves Weekend for Heroix IT Staff
2007-12-18 17:39:00
December 18, 2007 Customer and prospects sometimes ask us if we use our own software here at Heroix for application performance and network monitoring, and the answer is yes. We use Longitude to monitor our production servers and critical applications and alert us when a problem is detected. Besides helping us keep our own IT house in order, it gives our engineers a first-hand view of what you experience when you use our software. We think it helps us deliver better support and, in the long run, better monitoring software. Recently Longitude detected that our ftp site was down during a weekend so it notified the engineer on call. No one likes to have their weekend interrupted (especially once Sunday football TV coverage starts), but given the hours that our customers and prospects keep, someone may be trying to download the software at any time. However, in this case, the problem was just a transient lapse in network connectivity. Longitude recognized this, and sent a “problem cle...
More About: Network , Weekend , Staff , Monitoring

Custom monitoring for server reboots
2007-11-01 16:03:00
November 1, 2007 Sometimes our customers come to us for tailored solutions to meet a specific need. Recently I got a call from one of our customers who wanted to be alerted when their servers were rebooting, so they can track the times at which reboots are occurring. Although Longitude does detect servers that are down, there are cases in any interval-based monitoring situation where a server can reboot without being caught because it is not down long enough to warrant the trigger of a “server down” alert. However, in this case, the customer needed to know about every single reboot on their Windows and Unix servers, even reboots that cause only momentary interruptions. First we helped them deploy a custom solution for Windows that reads a value in WMI and creates an event whenever a reboot occurs. At each interval it checks the reboot time and compares it to what it observed in the previous interval. If there is a difference in value, Longitude knows there was a reboot and sends...
More About: Server , Monitoring , Custom , Serve

When you need agent-based monitoring
2007-10-23 16:33:00
October 23, 2007 When we built Longitude, we were intent on making it an agentless product because our customers had been asking for monitoring software that was quicker to deploy and easier to maintain than agent-based software; and in some cases, corporate policies discouraged or even prohibited the installation of monitoring software on production servers. But there are actually times when an agent becomes necessary. For example, sometimes a user has a computer or group of computers that are otherwise unable to communicate with Longitude’s management station for various reasons. This could be because the computers to be monitored are in another domain. In other cases Longitude is installed on an open source system (Linux) and the user needs to monitor Windows computers. What does the user do in these situations? The solution is simple: Longitude’s stand-alone statistics server can act as a mini-agent and enable data collection. The statistics server is the component of Longit...
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Longitude at Work in the e-Commerce World
2007-10-19 15:26:00
October 19, 2007 Many of our Longitude customers support clients conducting e-commerce business. IT groups at these companies face serious pressure to keep networks and applications running at peak efficiency. If problems arise it can mean less than acceptable service levels and subsequently the loss of significant revenue for their clients. They turn to Longitude’s application performance and network monitoring to help them avoid these issues. We recently spent some time talking with one our clients supporting e-commerce customers, Hanover Direct. They shared with us the ways in which Longitude helps them achieve optimal business performance. Hanover Direct is a provider of quality, branded merchandise through a portfolio of catalogs and e-commerce platforms and their clients include Domestications, The Company Store, and Company Kids, whose e-commerce sites receive more than eight million web site hits per day. According to systems administrator, Jason Valli, his IT group needs...
More About: World , Work , Commerce , E-Commerce

Measuring the End User Experience: Transactions continued
2007-10-12 22:54:00
October 12,2007 Last week I began a discussion about Longitude’s ability to monitor and report on transactions. In my October 4 entry I discussed simple transactions which give users yes or no answers about how their infrastructure components are working. In this week’s entry I will discuss more advanced transactions – user experience transactions – which are measured synthetically and give users qualitative information about how their web-based applications are performing. Longitude enables customers to emulate the experience of a web site user by recording web transactions of interest, and then replaying them to assess the availability, response and content of the site. They can then specify how frequently they want the transaction to run. Longitude will initiate the synthetic transaction as scheduled, and report events when problems are detected. Longitude can provide intelligent alerts to notify a user whenever a transaction fails, does not return expected content, or ex...
More About: Transactions , Experience , User , Erie , Tran

Transactions: Yes, no and how long?
2007-10-04 20:14:00
Transaction monitoring and reporting are a big part of Long itude’s agentless, multiplatform application performance and network monitoring capabilities. Longitude can monitor and report on everything from simple transactions such as ping and http to more complicated user experience-type transactions which are typically run synthetically. In this blog entry I will discuss the simple transactions that Longitude can monitor and then next week I will continue the conversation by discussing the higher-end user experience capabilities. Although we are calling these transactions “simple,” testing pings, http, SQL queries, FTP and Telnet, etc. (click here to see a full list of the transactions that Longitude monitors) is certainly not unimportant. Rather, these are critical components that our customers must check to determine the health and responsiveness of applications that support business operations. The transaction function not only tests the “if” of a transaction but ...
More About: Transactions , Tran , Ansa

Longitude prevents email disaster at Heroix headquarters
2007-09-25 16:10:00
September 25, 2007 Here at Heroix headquarters we rely on a multiplatform network of servers supporting the critical applications required to run our business and development operations. And of course to ensure that everything is functioning as it should be, we use Longitude to monitor it all. Last week we received an alert from Longitude warning us that we were running low on disk space on our Exchange server. Like any business, we rely on email for everything from internal communication to sales inquiries to customer support. So in a case of “eating our own dog food” we experienced what it was like to have our own product save us from having any problems with business as usual. The alert read: The free space is critically low on disk C: on <<our Exchange server name>> at 1679 MB, or 9.82%. If all disk space has been used, new files will not be able to be created which may result in critical applications failing. This disk should be reviewed to see if there are fil...
More About: Email , Disaster , Headquarters , Quarter

Proactive Monitoring: Using the Event Monitor to stay a step ahead
2007-09-20 18:20:00
September 20, 2007 Research that we recently completed through a customer survey shows us that proactive monitoring is of top priority in many businesses. One of the most important things our clients do to stay ahead in their monitoring practices is troubleshoot for potentially recurring problems and make sure they won’t happen again. We’ve engineered Longitude to enable them to do this right when the problem happens, before their attention turns to other priorities. Straight from the Longitude Event Monitor – which is our central monitoring station – they can quickly and easily respond to an issue and create a process for future prevention without having to find their way to another part of the User Interface. For example, if a customer had an issue with low free memory, they would want to further investigate the causes of this problem to avoid it in the future. Straight from the event screen, the client could: Drill down for detail (e.g., which process is causing the memo...
More About: Step , Proactive , Monitoring

Monitoring in today’s mobile work environment
2007-09-12 16:19:00
September 12, 2007 Recently, one of our clients asked us how to shorten event email alerts for display on their administrators’ handheld devices. Since most of their administrators are spending less time at their desks and more time in the field, it made more sense for the alerts to be customized for reading from these devices. I walked them through the process of editing the XML files in the Longitude installation directory for this specific use. But customers can also easily edit the text of alerts by using Longitude’s correlated events function and creating an event with their own text without having to do any coding. This got me thinking about how well-suited the User Interface is to all kinds of changes in the workforce. More employees are checking email from a BlackBerry® and other handheld devices, and more and more companies allow their employees to work from home to allow for flexibility with hours, commuting and family needs. The User Interface in Longitude – whic...
More About: Environment , Mobile , Work , Today , Monitoring

MIB monitoring made simple
2007-09-06 17:42:00
September 6, 2007 Everyone notices that Longitude monitors Cisco devices right out of the box. But some customers aren’t immediately aware that it works for any network device that complies with RFC-1213, the industry standard adopted by virtually all router and switch vendors. I’ve even used it on my LinkSys router at home. Still, sometimes customers ask if Longitude can monitor any of the rapidly growing number of ‘network appliances’ finding their way into our environments. Since there are so many devices to monitor out there, we built the SNMP Studio in Longitude to monitor anything with a MIB (Management Information Base). More importantly, it was designed with the occasional user in mind; it’s not just for programmers! The SNMP Studio comes pre-loaded with a variety of MIBs, and additional MIBs can be added easily. Creating a solution in the SNMP Studio is as simple as browsing a MIB tree to select SNMP objects for collection and then simply checking a couple of ...
More About: Made , Simple , Monitoring

Customers Share IT Priorities: Proactive monitoring that is easy and cost-e
2007-08-29 17:09:00
August 29, 2007 We recently conducted a survey of our Longitude customers with the help of third party industry experts Ptak, Noel and Associates, LLC. Respondents participated in either an online survey or a phone interview with a PNA analyst. The findings were quite interesting but two main points really stood out. The first were the reasons why our customers chose Longitude and the second was the fact that proactive monitoring is still a top priority among IT professionals. More than half of our responding customers said that they chose Longitude for its ease of use and cost-effectiveness. The customers were also asked about the time it took to deploy Longitude. Half of them said it took mere minutes and another quarter of our customers said it took only hours. Those are pretty significant statements about our product because they show how important some of our best features – quick deployment without the cost of individual agents – are to customers. The survey also rev...
More About: Customers , Cost , Share , Easy , Proactive

The thing about agents is we don’t need them…
2007-08-21 16:01:00
August 21, 2007 I recently read an interesting article in Network World’s Network/Systems Management Newsletter. In her article, Denise Dubie talks about agents as “necessary evils” in the collection of data and performance monitoring. She discusses an interview she had with Jean-Pierre Garbani, Forrester Research Vice President, who covers IT systems management. Garbani believes that agents could become a thing of the past because operating systems, such as Windows, will eventually provide the essential data currently only collected by an agent. Both Dubie and Garbani talk about agents being “the bane of IT professionals’ existence” because of the time and manpower they require, and they count on them eventually going by the wayside. We at Heroix agree, and in fact Heroix Longitude is already out there making agentless, multiplatform application and performance monitoring a reality for many companies. Longitude is not the only agentless-capable product on the ...
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VMware monitoring with Longitude
2007-08-15 17:19:00
August 15, 2007 With the increasing need for consolidation in IT organizations, many of our Longitude customers have asked us to add VMware monitoring capabilities to our product. In June, we added this comprehensive solution to our out-of-the-box application performance and network monitoring capabilities. The Longitude VMware solution provides the ability to check for: Excessive CPU utilization on individual virtual machines Excessive I/O rate on individual virtual machines and total rate across all machines Excessive network rates on individual virtual machines and total network rates across all virtual machines Low free memory on each virtual machine and across all virtual machines Low free space on the physical machine Whether each virtual machine is powered on Many of our customers using this feature want to monitor their virtual environments to avoid overwhelming the physical server’s resources. By providing the capability to monitor virtual machines, Longitude V5 allows ...
More About: Monitoring , Vmware

Longitude Named Editor’s Best Award Winner by Windows IT Pro
2007-08-07 16:23:00
August 7, 2007 Longitude was recently named as a winner of the “Editor ’s Best Award s” in the interoperability category by Penton Media’s Windows IT Pro® magazine. According to their group publisher, Kim Paulsen: “The 2007 Editor’s Best Awards utilize our editors’ product knowledge… to identify exceptional products that have been covered in the pages of Windows IT Pro. Our editors demand solid value and performance from the products they select.” I am very proud of this award and, in my opinion, we do deliver the “solid value and performance” that the Windows IT Pro editors are looking for. We constantly deliver this because we invite feedback from our customers and listen to what they want. With each release of our product, we add features and monitoring capabilities based on what our customers say they need. For example, with the recent launch of Longitude V5 we were able to add several new features, including VMware capabilities and synthet...
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Determining a good threshold for a transaction component in an SLA
2007-07-31 16:41:00
July 31, 2007 In my previous blog entry on July 17th I continued talking about defining SLAs. Here I complete that conversation. In Longitude, you can either use the Statistics Dashboard or the SLA itself to observe transaction response times and get a reasonable first cut estimate for values to use as degraded/unacceptable thresholds. In the statistics dashboard, simply create a widget for the transaction you’re incorporating into your SLA and select “Response Time” as the Statistic to monitor. If you use the SLA itself, the transaction may not be visible in the SLA dashboard if there haven’t been any transaction failures. In that case, select the “Healthy Computers” check box to the left of the SLA detail diagram - the pie chart will be completely green, but each transaction will be listed with an average Response Time value, and an available detail graph displaying a timeline graph of the Response Time values. A couple of additional notes ...
More About: Good , Hold , Term , Component , Tran

Why customers choose Longitude
2007-07-26 15:51:00
July 26, 2007 One of our newer clients, Access Enterprise Solutions, recently shared their reasons for choosing Longitude . AES is a remote support services provider that delivers targeted business and technology solutions for ERP services, strategy and program oversight, staff augmentation, and selective outsourcing for database, operating system, and application support. According to their Director of Outsourcing, Michael Hillenbrand, AES was looking for an application performance and network monitoring solution that met a long list of criteria to support their customers. Specifically, they needed a product that met these conditions: It had to be agentless (no software to install on the customer servers). It needed to provide the alerts they would need to proactively administer the databases. It must support what they support (Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL) It needed to provide customizable SLA event and reporting capabilities. It must work out of the box with little or no configurat...
More About: Customers , Choose , Custom

SLAs continued: Define the business service
2007-07-17 16:34:00
July 17, 2007 In my previous blog entry on June 18th I began talking about defining SLAs. Here I continue that conversation. When you define an SLA, there are two steps - the first is to break your distributed application into discrete components, and the second is to define acceptable performance levels for each component. While the first step is usually straightforward, (SQL on one server, IIS on another, SMTP on a third server, etc.) the second step can be more difficult. The Longitude SLA has three levels of performance – acceptable, degraded, and unacceptable. Degraded is actually a subclass of acceptable; while an application is degraded, it is still technically performing acceptably, just not optimally. These three levels of service are incorporated into SLAs when you define the compliance information – there is a “Required percent of time in acceptable state” (which is acceptable plus degraded), and “Required percent of time in good state” (...
More About: Business , Service , Vice , Fine , The Bus

Correlate your events: You’re not monitoring in a vacuum
2007-07-10 19:15:00
July 10, 2007 Customers and prospects commonly ask about correlated events. They want to know what they are and why they should use them. I usually explain to them that without correlation of your events, you’re basically monitoring in isolation. If you’re monitoring application, system, and network events without comparing them to each other, how can you really know what impact the individual components are having on your business? For example, if a router goes down or a database experiences delays, will it affect a customer-facing website? If you want to be able to understand how entire business processes are being affected, you need to be able to correlate alerts and events. First off, you need to know the root cause of your problem. Does a web-based response time problem on your e-commerce site originate in the application server, back end database, network or web server? If a server is unreachable, is the server itself down or is there a problem with the router? Knowing the...
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Custom Application and Network Monitoring Without Writing Scripts
2007-07-03 18:51:00
July 3, 2007 Longitude Creates Tailored Service Level Agreements for Critical, Custom Application s Many of our customers use specially-designed applications to run critical portions of their businesses. Fallon Clinic – one of the largest private multi-specialty medical groups in Massachusetts with more than 240 physicians practicing in over 20 locations and more than 1 million patient visits per year – uses several applications customized for health care organizations from Epic Systems. Epic Systems’ applications help health care organizations with scheduling, managing patient records, and organizing patient care functions such as lab orders and test results. If an application is not functioning properly, the Fallon Clinic practices cannot effectively treat their patients and medical errors can occur. Many IT organizations find custom applications difficult to monitor in that they require the cumbersome writing of scripts. With Longitude, companies can monitor their applica...
More About: Writing , Network , Scripts , Monitoring

Announcing Longitude V5!
2007-06-20 17:49:00
June 26, 2007 Last week we announced the launch of our fifth generation of Heroix Longitude . In many organizations, lean staff and limited budgets mean that IT departments need to prove how well they’re doing while ensuring that essential business functions are performing at their peak. In addition, it is often difficult for IT to find the cause of application or network problems among a sea of data. Longitude V5 focuses on helping make this easier by bringing the most relevant information to the forefront so that the meaning of the data is clearer. With more understanding comes faster problem resolution and better decision making which ultimately leads to a better bottom line. Some of our new features include:   Anno tated SLAs and reports – Performance metrics can now be linked with underlying event information, allowing immediate drill down for troubleshooting. Additionally, IT can now add comments to reports and SLAs, giving stakeholders a complete picture and unders...