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How Network Management Speeds Research at Baylor College of Medicine
2/7/2008
"I'd rather come to them and say, 'You're at 95 percent full on this project. Is there a way to remove some stuff? Or do we need to add some more space to this project?'" he said. "These scientific types, they want to work when they want to work. IT shouldn't get in the way of their efforts--it should facilitate them. They shouldn't have to spend hours to move [files] between their local machines and the network so they have space to do things."
Improving Network Management
That desire for proactive management of network resources led King to try out OpenNMS, an open source network management program. The problem, he said, was that the program did a lot with SNMP. "What you ended up with was a whole bunch of false positives, a whole bunch of alerts. That's not something I needed at two in the morning."
It also required what King calls a "fair amount" of customization. "You'd need to get into the guts of it and tear things apart."
He realized that to configure the software properly would probably require a couple of dedicated months. So he sold management on the idea of finding an alternative solution that would cost less than two months of his time.
A casual mention on slashdot.org led King to check out Hyperic HQ, open source systems and application management software. He tried a free version and could see "immediate value." Calling it "ridiculously easy to install," King was sold. He contacted the company and negotiated a purchase of the enterprise version--about $500 per "platform." A platform, said King, is a term coined by the company, and it's roughly equivalent to two physical CPUs.
"It gives me just what I need, not more than I need," King explained. "It took me two hours to set up the whole environment. Literally, two hours." Now, he said, he has a really good view of what's going on, without being overwhelmed with system data. "It gives me the ability to be way out ahead of whatever's coming at me."
Hyperic's monitoring functionality
Also, the caliber of the alert fits the situation. When there's a catastrophic problem--such as switch or storage controller going bad--the software will inform him. "I have it set up to text message me at any time. But if one of my clustered web servers goes down in the middle of the night, it'll send me email because the other one is still working."
Another advantage: It's agent-based. "It doesn't go out and try to blast the whole network," King said. "You can say, 'I'm going to put it on this server.' The agent has the intelligence to say, 'I'm going to start looking for processes on the machine. If I identify something that I recognize, I'm going to gather metrics on that.'" If it's a domain controller, for instance, it'll gather statistics for LDAP connections, directory requests and the like. "It's all about what information do I want and what is too much?"
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