1 Introduction

DatacenterManager is Performance Monitoring / Trend Analysis Java Desktop and Client - Server application that automatically inventories and statistically monitors UNIX servers. (without installing extra software on your servers, just by using SSH and plain old UNIX commands). Therefore implementing DCM does not require server changes and it runs on almost any computer platform!

Your entire datacenter can be automatically inventoried by only supplying hostname, username & password for each server, either “one by one” or via an automated CSV host-list import file.

Virtually every large company has performance issues that usually arise from years of increased datacenter complexity and change in usage. Different root causes of performance bottlenecks dynamically float across your infrastructure, making it almost impossible to catch by hand in time. Manual diagnoses just isn't fast enough finding performance bottlenecks before they disappear. Most companies fail to improve business performance and give up and give in to frustration.

How?

DatacenterManager was especially designed to accurately inventory and monitor / poll all your server's resources and historically store the recorded performance data in a maintenance free database. The statistics can be searched and graphically viewed in a powerful trend analysis navigator for baselines workload comparison.

Performance

DatacenterManager's clever poller design makes the operational impact almost unnoticeable on your polled servers by minimized background data generation and communication. The Navigator allows any combination of monitored resource and time period for your statistics where full move and zoom operation are at hand in any direction! DCM's Navigator also let's you visualize growth expectancies used for Scalability Management. The DCMPoller can fetch and process 100 thousand resources per minute from a simple desktop computer to even up to a million resources / statistics per minute on a big server, due to it's multi threaded, ultralight architecture!

Polling

DCM interacts with your servers over encrypted SSH communication and does NOT use public key authentication, as it is based on password authentication, by automated terminal interaction. Fetching statistics by the minute, DCM simply reads and types the terminal like a human would, during the server authentication and terminal interaction processes!

2 How does it work

DatacenterManager is designed to make your life as easy as possible, being in control again. DatacenterManager installs in under a minute and no server changes are required to operate.

Adding server(s) to DCM is done by just providing a hostname, username and a password. DCM will then logon to your server(s), inventory them and add them to a build-in database.

Data Archives

All servers and resources in the inventory will be polled every minute by the DCMPoller (performance data collector) in the background (when turned on) and continuously update the massive numbers of (maintenance free) Historical Data Archives, saved for at least one year. Per server this can be easily up to hundreds of resources to monitor!

The Navigator

The DCM Navigator is a highly powerful search instrument, allowing you to select an absolute or relative period in time and any number of server-resources searching: “cpu” or “server1 diskio” or “solaris storage” and the next moment, you have your exact trend analysis or performance stats. Searching for CPUIDLE (in general) gives you a single line-graph with e.g. hundreds of servers showing you instant datacenter CPU performance over any required period and value scale.

Trend Viewer

The Trend View shows the line-graphs the way you told the Navigator to show it! This means any combination of resources over any time period! You can move left / right in time or zoom in / out in time, move up / down on the value scale or zoom in / or out on the value scale freely and your graphs are instantly and seamlessly updated as if your graph is an endless roll of film moving back and forth in time.

Desktop or Client - Server Operation

DCM has a standalone desktop interface and network enabled client – server components for multi-user and network distributed performance monitoring and management. This means in reality that you can set it up as a quick and stand-alone application monitoring your datacenter or you can setup a central server in use with multiple clients / users divided across your offices using the server simultaneously!

DCM Commander

DCM also has a DatacenterCommander that allows automatic (parallel or sequential) execution of any custom command or shell script on a large amount of selected servers in just seconds !