Features:
- Monitors Siebel Services, Gateway Services, Database and Network availability.
- Monitor the Siebel Application server and all the Tasks and processes in the Siebel App server, including custom components and tasks.
- Monitors as far down as the process level CPU and Memory utilization of a Siebel Task or Component. Out of the box graphs shows utilization of Memory, CPU, and Virtual Memory of all Siebel components and processes in the enterprise.
- Auto discovery of the entire Siebel Enterprise - maps and tracks all Application Servers, Gateways, and Component Specific Log file tracking.
- Define events for specific Siebel Components.
- Intelligent, programmable rules based monitoring system.
- Analyze Application data: Integrated SQL handling allows the ability to drill far into the application, instead of retrieving only superficial statistics.
- Built-in historical tracking and graphing of any data point defined.
- Extensive customization and integration capabilities.
- Monitors any application that is defined as NT Service or generates Log Files.
- Allows easy monitoring of Web Services, Database, LDAP etc.
- Supports Perl - the most powerful scripting language for regular expressions and rule definition.
Siebel Server Monitoring
The Siebel server is a multi process application that forms the critical 3rd tier in the Siebel architecture. Each Siebel server can contain hundreds of discreet components and tasks, each of which is responsible for various system functions. In Siebel 7 thin client architecture, the middle tier is even more critical, as all access to the Siebel environment is routed through the Siebel servers. How does one determine the availability of various Siebel components and tasks status?
The only traditional monitoring method availible to Siebel
Administrators
is to periodically check the Siebel Server
status visually.
VA2 can automate and perform
such checks with much greater
consistency and frequency.
For example, to monitor whether a
particular Siebel server is running,
though one could examine the Siebel
service on the OS level, that does not
really show whether critical components
within that service are running - such
as those which could allow your customers
to log into your website, or pass
transactions to ERP systems. The
ability to break down and distill the
information contained within the Siebel
server is critical maintaining a healthy system.
What Virtual Administrator offers:
Log event tracking: Siebel has a fairly sophisticated method of publishing events in log files for each component on the Siebel Server. However, capturing those events is up to you as an administrator. Virtual Administrator offers a seamless system with the most efficient and powerful >real-time log processing available. Virtual Administrator allows graphic definition of log file searches, and routing of events and reactions based on those events. Furthermore, this same system can be applied to any application running on a Virtual Administrator host.
Task and Component Tracking: Our system of tracking components running in the Siebel Server and components status is the most advanced available. Our distilled Server Status information makes the creation of analysis rules easy and powerful.
Virtual Administrator also offers a graphical representation of the resources each Server Task or Component is consumes, and the ability to implement rules based on this information.
Analysis Rules and Statistic Collectors: VA2 was built with several core objectives in mind. One was to be extendible and flexible. Hard coding a system to track CPU usage or even Siebel Server status is only of limited benefit in a real world production IT environment. That a business system is functioning correctly may be defined by many parameters, not just hardware/software components. There must be access to business data. While an IT manager may need to know memory and CPU utilization, an accounting manager may wish to monitor the number of purchases generated by the system in a given day. The power to analyze data is an essential part of truly monitoring a business application.
Utilization of user definable Analysis Rules and Statistic collectors provides the true power of the system, and the means to collect, track, and act upon disparate data sources.
VA2 Statistics track a discreet data point, from virtually any source, at a given interval. The advantage of a statistic is that the data is retained for historical purposes, allowing trending and reporting not available through dynamic reporting capabilities.
Analysis Rules act upon the collected statistics, or other data sources, such as Siebel Server information, to make intelligent decisions on system health. Analysis rules can be created for nearly anything. VA2 was implemented using the power and flexibility of an open source Perl based rules, instead of implementing restrictive proprietary scripting.
Virtual Administrator allows you to track both the traditional system statistics and data points that other systems would never track, but may be the determing factor of a truly healthy system.
Extensibility and Integration
There is no limit on the number and type of useful rules available. Analysis Rules and Statistics are importable via XML files, and a growing user community is providing internet posted packaged analysis rules, in addition to the out-of-the-box variety.
VA2 allows one to define any NT Service Application, or any group of applications as a managed software system. In Siebel's case, the Web Server, LDAP Service, Database servers, and a host of other components can be added in for monitoring and grouped under one logical system.
VA2 has an event handling mechanism that is also extendible. Any XML-RPC compliant programming language can send an event into the Virtual Administrator system. If, therefore, interval based analysis rules prove not powerful enough, then custom event generators can be created to track very specialized needs, such as complex integration projects, which typically lack sufficient monitoring and standard interfaces.
Monitoring Features
- All components run as NT Services.
- Local collection agents send data to a central repository.
- GUI Runs as industry standard MMC -allowing users to group multiple management data sources together.
- Multiple Administrators and Schedules definable for routing notifications.
- Multiple notification channels available.
- Backed by RDBMS - Oracle or MSSQL 7/2000.
- Define any ODBC compliant data source for Analysis.
- Monitor any NT Service or Log directory.
- Define reactions and Notifications for events. Reactions can be executed centrally or routed to a local monitor agent.
What can VA2 Monitor?
These are some of the items VA2 can monitor. Since the Analysis Rule and Statistic collector infrastructure is extensible, this is a list of some of the possibilities for monitoring.
Siebel Server Related:
- Siebel Gateway availability
- Siebel Server Availability
- Log event monitoring - customizable to each individual
component
- Perl regular expression power for log file events
- Server Task status anlization
- Component status monitoring
- Determine that there are at least X number of X tasks
running in the Siebel Enterprise
- Server task and component monitoring down to 30 second
intervals
- Monitoring of number of Multi Threaded Server processes
started per component
- Warning on MTS processes nearing the Max MTS process limit
per component
- Graphical view of resources used by spawned by Siebel
Server processes
- Graphical view of resources consumed per component
- Historical tracking of components and resource usage
- Execution of Server Manager reactions
Siebel Functional/Data Area
- Siebel Remote
- Determine whether there is a transaction backlog in for
S_DOC_TXN_LOG
- Historical record of S_DOC_TXN_LOG
- Siebel Sales
- Number of Opportunities per day
- Number of Accounts per day
- Number of activities
Administration
- Number of employees
- Siebel Workflow
- Expired Workflow rules
- Records stacking in S_ESCL_REQ
- Many More!!
General Monitoring
- Monitor any NT Service
- Web Server (IIS)
- Database Service (Oracle, MSSQL, etc)
- LDAP Service
- Actuate
- Monitor Log file for any defined application
- Use the power of Perl regular expressions
- Monitor any ODBC Compliant data source
- Wmi monitoring and analysis of any WMI statistics for
Windows servers
- Database Related (some capabilities are DB Server specific)
- Graphing of response times for any SQL statement
- Tracking key table growth and size
- Database size in MB
- Tracking key index growth rate
- Many more!!