For proactively monitoring and managing our customer environments we’re using either Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control or our own developed monitoring solution, Blue Gecko Monocle. We can also tap into an existing monitoring platform, but prefer using monitoring solutions built specially for the product stack we’re supporting.
 Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control: |
Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control is a Systems Management framework for managing, monitoring and reporting on entire enterprise grids with hundreds, even thousands of target hosts and databases. This solution offers a unique Business-driven approach to IT management.
Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control not only monitors the entire technology strack, it also provides a complete view of the health and performance of business transactions across different tiers of technology.
Functionality can be extended by means of Grid Control Management Packs, Plug-Ins or Connectors. Thereby extending the capabilities for Oracle technologies, network and operating system to include third party products like MS SQL Server and specific storage and network components.
 Blue Gecko Monocle: |
For all system monitoring and alerting activities on hosted environments, Blue Gecko uses a combination of our own open-source database-monitoring package, Monocle, and the popular open-source package Nagios.
Monocle collects and analyzes data from both Oracle and MySQL databases and stores that data in its own repository for alert processing and trending analysis. Monocle’s collection routines are lightweight and use as much information that already exists in the database as possible, such as Oracle’s Automatic Workload Repository. All system monitoring collection is performed locally, and metadata is sent back to our central Nagios cluster for processing over an encrypted channel.
 Using custom Nagios plug-ins, the collected data is analyzed and processed for alerting our DBAs, our customers’ DBAs, or any combination. Schedules and thresholds can be tailored to each customer’s needs and requirements using the robust Nagios alerting engine. Alerts are sent to our operation center via SMS, email, and are visually represented on the Nagios console. Acknowledgement of an alert will automatically create an incident with servicedesk. If Internet connectivity from our Nagios cluster fails, we use directly connected telephone lines to dial-out and deliver the alerts to our operation center staff. |
Monocle and Nagios allow us to create sophisticated monitors for not only system metrics but application and business metrics as well. As our monitoring library grows, all customers receive the benefit of new and improved system monitoring. All alert history is maintained in the Monocle and Nagios repositories.
Call Blue Gecko today and learn how we can implement the monitoring your environment.