The Blog of Ben Rockwood

Up.Time Software: The Ultmate Monitoring Solution

26 Jan '08 - 10:07 by benr

A couple things here and there have kept me from continuing my series of posts regarding systems management solutions. One of the monitoring solutions I've planned to write about it Up.Time. While I haven't had the time to write it, I was thrill to check my favorite site, SunHelp.org, and see that Super Admin Bill Bradford wrote an excellent review himself: Software Review: up.time 4 Enterprise Monitoring.

In my professional opinion, Up.Time is the best, most comprehensive, and most polished out of the box solution available at any price. Yes, its proprietary closed source commercial software... but, whether your using Zenoss, HP OpenView, Hyperic, or another other solution out there, your going to only get a small subset of monitoring capability without spending some time extending it yourself or digging around for modules written by someone else. Most, such as NetNMS or Zenoss, are limited by the OIDs exposed by SNMP and then extended by creating custom scripts that SSH into boxes every n seconds. Others such as Zabbix and Hyperic provide a client side agent that gathers up fairly generic information such as disk usage, CPU and memory usage, and maybe an odd and end on top. But Up.Time gathers a massive range of metrics, stores them all, and provides useful graphing and reporting capabilities, including report automation, to make it all very useful.

I've solved more than a few problems because of the realization that the historical data I needed to analyze a problem was already right under my nose because Up.Time had been gathering it and I didn't even realize it. A great example is IO response time! I spent quite a bit of time ripping apart iostat.c to learn how to extend Zabbix, Hyperic, or other solutions to record a_svct... then I realized that all that data was already being gathered with Up.Time right out of the box. Not only does it gather single return metrics, it also stores useful multi-string return data such as the top CPU consuming processes during a given period. Just knowing that the CPU was saturated on Monday of last week isn't enough! What was actually using that CPU? Up.Time can tell you, no modification required.

With all my searching to date, there is only one "install and forget" solution on the market, and thats Up.Time. If you want to solve your monitoring problems with money its hands down the solution you need to use. I'm not saying its perfect, there are a couple things here and there I'd like to change, but I'm hard pressed to find anything as powerful as it.

Read Bill Bradford's excellent review for a better look at Up.Time.

- - C O M M E N T S - -
Ben, while I’m a dedicated reader of your blog – and greatly enjoy it – I have to point out one issue with proprietary monitoring systems. I work part-time at a certain state university. Our network operations staff maintains three monitoring systems – HP OpenView, Tivoli, and now Nagios. There is a project underway to consider migrating everything to Nagios.

Why? Because apparently, when you support over 100,000 users, no single off-the-shelf solution will suffice (let alone scale well). Tivoli and OpenView are disasters. More importantly, unless you plan on updating your software whenever the vendor says, you’ll have to deal with your vendor deciding what hardware/monitoring capabilities you have.

I’m sure that Up.Time is a wonderful solution. But ‘if you want to solve your monitoring problems wiht money’, why not hire a consultant to customize Nagios or another open-source NMS, and roll that out? If everyone who used a proprietary NMS spent the same money on code additions to an open-source counterpart, and merged them back under the original license….

Jason (Email) (URL) - 28 January '08 - 18:33

jason, i know from experience myself how easy it is to install and use uptime and how much depth there is to the product. i also value and respect your opinion, but would encourage you to give it a look first to see for yourself and then see how the cost of the product really compares to what it might take a consultant to make nagios work like this product. who knows, you may end up choosing to migrate all of your monitoring tools over to uptime. ;-)

Jeff (Email) - 28 January '08 - 19:57

Jeff, I’ll definitely take a deeper look at it. At $university I don’t have any effect on purchasing of monitoring systems, unfortunately. The current setup is mainly because the forces that control purchasing used Tivoli/OpenView when they were working in the trenches, and want them to stay. Unfortunately, change comes very slowly. For my personal systems, cost isn’t an option. And for consulting clients – well, aside from the fact that I have yet to find one who asks for something that’s not open-source – if Nagios was quick to configure, I wouldn’t have that shiny new Treo 700.

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Stephenie (Email) (URL) - 09 November '08 - 19:08

Uptime might be a great install and forget solution but like Jason pointed out, it doesn’t scale for larger environments. Hyperic is leading the charge especially in the cloud monitoring world. They are also open source which gives you the flexibility to customize it for your specific environment. Heck, you can even download it for free so that’s what I use.

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Ben, I know I’m late on this review, but I’m comparing uptime versus PowerAdmin Server Monitor and I’m simply trying to justify the cost of uptime. Have you taken a look at PA Server Monitor yet? I mean like uptime, but you can’t ignore the $$$ difference.

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