hq on SWiK

Hyperic July Newsletter: OSCON and Beyond.

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 11:08:54 -0700

Download Hyperic HQ

In This Issue

Join us on LinkedIn
OSCON, 2008
LinuxWorld
And The Nominees Are…
CloudStatus Review
Upcoming HyperCASTs
HQ 4.0 Iterations
Best of the Blog
News Roundup

New to Hyperic HQ?

Don’t forget to check out our community resources designed to ensure your success!

Upcoming Events

Join With Other Hypericans on LinkedIn!

We have a new group on LinkedIn, and you’re invited to join now!

OSCON, 2008

OSCON was a blast this year, as usual. Every year, Portland becomes ground zero for free and open source companies and advocates. Sessions, panels, BoFs and parties. Hyperic sponsored the Community Choice Awards, and Robin Miller has the video to prove it!

Come See Us at LinuxWorld

Hyperic will be at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo all next week–8/4-8/7. Hyperic CEO, Javier Soltero, will be presenting "Virtual Nightmare? Mastering the Management of Virtualization in Production." with Mosso co-founder Jonathan Bryce. Register using our priority code: VPL368 and get free exhibit hall access or 20% off conference pricing.

And the Nominees Are…

Speaking of LinuxWorld, Hyperic is nominated for the LinuxWorld Product Excellence Awards. Twice. Hyperic HQ is a finalist in the "Best Systems Management" category, which it won last year. Hyperic’s newest product CloudStatus is a finalist for "Best Grid or Clustering Solution". Only a few weeks old and already running with the big dogs.

Learn More

CloudStatus Review

If you haven’t had a chance to take a closer look at CloudStatus, you can get the low down from this video/demo/interview posted at Linux.com. See what CloudStatus can do, and meet CloudStatus principal engineer, Jon Travis.

Watch the Video at Linux.com

Upcoming and Archived HyperCASTs

Be sure to tune in to this months amazing and informative webinars:

MySQL Enterprise and Hyperic HQ - How can Software as a Service (SaaS) providers and Managed Hosting Providers ensure service level agreements with a combination of MySQL Enterprise and Hyperic HQ? Tuesday, August 05, 2008, 10:00 am PST, 1:00 pm EST
Citrix Xen and Hyperic HQ - How to monitor and manage Citrix Xen with Hyperic HQ. Tuesday, August 12, 2008, 8:00 am PST, 11:00 am EST

If you’ve never seen any of our HyperCASTs, we have built a library of archives. Some of the recent ones include:

The Hyperic Roadmap

Building HQU Plugins

Hyperic HQ Iterations for 4.0

It won’t be long now. The 4.0 release is nearly upon us. Between now and launch, your window into the future of HQ is:

Best of the Blog

24 Hours at OSCON. - Jeremy Hogan’s gonzo OSCON re-cap.
Real Men of Geekness. - A little audio tribute we did for Sysadmin Appreciation Day.
CloudStatus and AWS - CloudStatus reported a major outage a full 20 minutes before it was posted to Amazon’s system status.
Who needs monitoring? - You do. Because you’d probably prefer to find out about cloud outages sometime before it hit the news.

Hyperic in the News

Stacey Higginbotham writes about VC’s increasing interest in the cloud, mentioning Hyperic as an option for monitoring.
Andrea James of the Seattle Post Intelligencer puts in her two cents about the S3 outage, and even includes quotes from Hyperic’s Jon Travis
Exciting news from the Adventure of Open Source blog, as OpenNMS announces OUCH, a new integration standing for OpenNMS, Ubuntu, Concursive and Hyperic

HyperLINKS June 25, 2008

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 06:08:43 -0700

GigaOm’s Structure Conference took center stage today and lots of interesting stories are coming down the pipeline. Here are today’s top picks:

While participating on a panel at Structure titled “Working the Cloud: NetGen Infrastructure for New Entrepreneurs ,” Google’s Christophe Bisciglia, was forced by several other panelists to defend the openness of BigTable, Google’s internal database system

Alistair Croll of BitCurrent offers 5 reasons why cloud computing isn?t just hype: power and cooling are expensive, demand is global, computing is ubiquitous, applications are built from massive and smart parts, and clouds let us experiment

Zack Urlocker writes about Progress?s acquisition of IONA for $162 million

Even Worse than It Appears?

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 11:21:46 -0700

Two things today.

First, thanks to Cote, Matt, Javier and others for their kind words. I am tremendously excited to be working with Hyperic. I’ve liked the company for a long time, and I’m even more impressed by the team and the strategy now that I am spending a couple of days a week here. I haven’t abandoned retirement altogether, but I have allowed it to erode a little bit because I like this opportunity so much.

Second, I want to pile on Javier’s post on the availability issues at Amazon over the past several days.

It’s worth pointing out that it had to be a pretty lousy weekend for the people responsible for running Amazon’s infrastructure. If you take a step back, the only reason that the downtime is remarkable is because it’s so rare. Nobody blinks when Twitter goes off-line. When my own favorite retailer since 1997 disappears, you notice it, because it simply never happens. I bet that things settle down quickly and we get back to the fast and reliable storefront that we’ve all come to expect.

Javier and others have touched on a likely cause of the outage: Complexity. As systems get more moving parts, they become harder to monitor and maintain. Many hope that the move to cloud computing will make things better; as you use infrastructure in the cloud, the thinking goes, you’ll be able to rely on the cloud service provider to keep it running.

As the downtime with Amazon’s storefront demonstrates, that’s a false hope. If you rely on computing services anywhere, you need to monitor them, and you need to understand how their availability affects your operations. IT shops are running more applications — JBoss, Tomcat, MySQL, home-grown software to run their businesses, along with the laundry list of proprietary and legacy applications they’ve installed over the years. These interact with one another. Every one of these software programs, and every connection among them, is a new potential source of failure.

We hardly ever abandon old systems and infrastructure. We only add new ones. Increased complexity is an irresistible force of nature, and managing it requires new techniques and new tools.

Back to the Amazon outage specifically: I’ve seen a couple of quotes in the media from people who have said, more or less, “Gee, whatever they changed that messed things up, they should have changed it during off hours.”

The fact of the matter is that there is no longer any such thing as “off hours.” For Amazon certainly, the storefront runs constantly. It may be nighttime in North America, but it’s daylight in Eastern Europe and Asia. More and more businesses — and especially those that deliver services over the Internet — simply never get to shut their computers down for maintenance. Their operations infrastructure has to take that into account.

More software running on more hardware in more places equals more complexity. At the same time, users all over the globe expect instantaneous access to data and services from anyplace, anytime. That combination means that IT professionals are staring at some pretty serious problems. The situation is even worse than it appears, though: For many businesses, as for Amazon, if the computers go down, the money stops flowing.

I’m glad to be at Hyperic because we’re working on the hard problems. Manageability of core infrastructure is the iceberg in front of most businesses, these days.

First, get the right people on the bus

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:04:50 -0700

Normally, I try to avoid reading business books. I especially avoid those promoting the secret sauce to building great companies. I figure the folks who actually do the building often tend to be too busy working, or otherwise enjoying the fruits of their labors instead of writing books. Plus, there are no shortcuts into building enduring companies, regardless of what we might see occasionally in the tech sector.

A few months ago I found myself at a bookstore and ended up buying a book called Good to Great. It’s actually a decent book, particularly because it is based on actual research.

One of the central elements of the book deals with the task of making sure you have the right team in place (”Get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus”). We’ve followed that advice already and built a stellar team here at Hyperic, and this week I’m happy to announce that we’ve been lucky to add another superstar to our team. Mike Olson, former CEO of Sleepycat Software (makers of BerkleyDB, later sold to Oracle) will be working with Hyperic helping us develop the next generation of killer products. He’s still officially retired, but we were blown away by his passion for what we’re doing and have convinced him to spend time with us as we continue to build a great company. Unfortunately, I don’t have a cool picture of Mike next to the Hyperic logo like we had for Barry, but I’m sure he doesn’t mind.

Mike will also be blogging occasionally here at Hyperic, so watch this space for his musings on everything except databases (which he swears he’s done with).

May Newsletter

Fri, 30 May 2008 16:43:12 -0700

Download Hyperic HQ

In This Issue

Velocity Conference
We’re Hiring!
Vote for HQ in 2008
Twittering Hyperic
AOTMP Survey
Upcoming HyperCASTs
HQ 4.0 Iterations
Best of the Blog
News Roundup

New to Hyperic HQ?

Don’t forget to check out our community resources designed to ensure your success!

Upcoming Events

Velocity Conference

June 23-24

Burlingame, CA

Velocity Conference

O’Reilly’s Velocity Conference is only weeks away! This is a conference we helped design and build just for our users, the web operations teams powering some of the coolest companies on the planet. As such, Hyperic is a Diamond Sponsor and our own Javier Soltero will deliver a keynote “Clouds Are no Substitute for Competence.” With cloud computing lurking as the next big disrupter in the web operations world, you’ll want to hear what Javier has to say. And, for being a friend-of-Hyperic, you get a hefty discount!

To claim your 20% registration discount, use this code: vel08hyp

Visit the Velocity Conference site

We’re Hiring!

Come join a stellar team of people to build, promote, sell, and service world-class Hyperic monitoring technologies. We have a wide range of positions available, and one is sure to catch your eye.

See the list of open positions and apply today!

Vote for HQ in 2008

No, we’re not talking about Super Tuesday (there’s plenty enough candidates in that race already). We’re talking about the SourceForge.net 2008 Community Choice Awards! If you think Hyperic HQ deserves some recognition for the hard work and determination it has shown you this year, cast your vote for HQ in the category of your choice.

Click here to vote for HQ

Twittering Hyperic

If you’re not familiar with Twitter, then where have you been for the last 2 months? When the occasional tweet isn’t getting you out of a foreign prison or helping you report on up-to-the-minute world events, it can also be a great way to follow something you care about. Like Hyperic! We’ll soon be updating the website and forums to take advantage of this new form of communication with our community of users and interested onlookers.

Call For Survey Participants

AOTMP is the industry authority on best practices and standards for managing enterprise voice, wireless, and data network services. AOTMP is seeking to better understand enterprises? challenges in network management for an upcoming report on industry trends and best practices, and who better to tell them than you, faithful reader?! Respondents to this survey will be enrolled in a drawing for opportunities to win a US$200 travelers check.

Click here to take the survey

Upcoming and Archived HyperCASTs

Can’t get enough HQU? Want to get every last drop of performance out of MySQL? Would you like to see into Hyperic’s technological future? We’ve got you covered with these upcoming HyperCASTs. Click to RSVP.

Practical Development of HQU Plugins & ResourcesJon Travis, Engineering and Marie McGarry, Documentation
June 3rd, 2008 11:00 PDT / 18:00 UTC
Using HQ to Performance Tune MySQLMike Mennis, Quality Assurance
June 17th, 2008 11:00 PDT / 18:00 UTC
Product Roadmap ReviewChip Witt, Product Management and Charles Lee, Engineering
July 8th, 2008 11:00 PDT / 18:00 UTC

If you’ve never seen any of our HyperCASTs, we have built a library of archives. Some of the recent ones include:

Hyperic HQ Iterations for 4.0

Our engineers have been taking a community approach in plotting the develpment of Hyperic HQ 4.0. One of the most visible changes wrought by this change in approach is the publishing of iterations, very early pre-alpha versions of code, on SourceForge.net. If you’re very curious and love to tinker and hack on developmental code, take a look:

Hyperic HQ 4.0 Iterations
Hyperic HQ 4.0 Roadmap - Learn about the progress and goals of the HQ 4.0 release

Best of the Blog

Hyperic Announces MySQL Performance Study Results - A very cool study of the performance and scale we’ve been able to achieve using MySQL with HQ.
VMotion Sickness Epidemic Worse Than We Thought - Stacey Schneider offers some shocking analysis of the effects of Virtualization on otherwise normal, healthy SysAdmins.
Atlassian Using Hyperic - We noticed something cool recently on their wiki. As big fans and users of Atlassian’s work, it’s nice to see the feeling is mutual.

Hyperic in the News

Using agent-based monitoring despite reservations - Megan Santosus writes about the Contegix case study, including mention of Contegix’s use of Hyperic HQ.
Guide to Server Management - Denise Dubie writes about virtual server management, noting Hyperic HQ as an open source tool that can manage virtual servers.
Red Hat Heads For The JON 2.0 - Sean Michael Kerner writes about the JBoss ON announcement. Hyperic is mentioned in a quote from Katrinka McCallum about our involvement.

Atlassian Using Hyperic

Fri, 30 May 2008 10:44:30 -0700

I just saw that Atlassian, the provider of the essential community tools like Confluence wiki and JIRA ticket system, updated their wiki on the importance of monitoring the “lifeblood of your organization”.

They even outline the important monitoring tasks you need, and stress that it will help when dealing with their own world class support.

Monitoring involves a number of essential tasks, including those listed below:

Monitoring log files.

Checking for HTTP-availability and performance (e.g. by getting the same page every five minutes and displaying the time on a graph).

Looking at many different parameters such as load, connections, IO, database-trends, and so on.

Charting long-term trends.

Keeping an access log of requests to the web server. This is vital, especially when requesting performance-related support from Atlassian.

They even pass on a screenshot of their Hyperic HQ deployment, which if you notice, they are hosted by Contegix, another Hyperic customer.

We agree 100% with Atlassian that it is critical to monitor their apps, which is why we’re also working with them to build application specific management plugins for Confluence and JIRA.

MySQL Tuning with HQ

Wed, 07 May 2008 11:14:35 -0700

This past Monday, May 5th, I had the opportunity to speak at Community One on Scaling MySQL. The presentation was based on several months of work to integrate and tune MySQL in to our fastest supported database. MySQL is the fourth database I have developed on, and while working with it I have found a bunch of nice features that are simple to use which made HQ run extremely fast. Unfortunately MySQL has some big issues with their query optimizer that made the work a bit more tedious than it needed to be.

Here are my top 3 keys to tuning MySQL ->

1) Query Tuning
Always run “explain” on your queries. Make sure they use indexes where applicable and do not table scan where you can help it.
Try to avoid using tmp tables where you can in queries. If you cannot avoid them make sure the tmp table size is as small as possible.

2) Use of Indexes
Make sure you use your clustered index / primary key wisely. For a table which is written a lot don’t use too many indexes due to overhead of CRUD operations, and on the flip side for a static table make sure it has plenty of index access points and use covering indexes where applicable.

3) Know the MySQL server options and know how to monitor them to make sure they are not out of control.

innodb_buffer_pool_size
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit
tmp_table_size, max_heap_table_size, and max_tmp_tables
innodb_flush_method

For slow query management, make sure you monitor the tmp table status from “show global status”
Created_tmp_files, Created_tmp_tables and especially Created_tmp_disk_tables

HQ offers a very easy and effective way to facilitate this monitoring. If these status vars grow too fast make sure to turn on your slow query log and debug the slow queries. There is usually always something that can be done.

Also, feel free to check out http://support.hyperic.com/confluence/display/DOC/MySQL+DB+Preparation for our recommended options. It is not a one size fits all, but a good place to start in order to tune the MySQL server options.

HQ running on MySQL exemplifies the potential that the database has to scale any application. It still has a ways to go in terms of features to compete in all spaces, but every major release it keeps getting better.

Here is a link to my presentation from Community One:

http://download.hyperic.com/documentation/commone-mysql.ppt

Hyperic Announces MySQL Performance Study Results

Wed, 07 May 2008 08:15:47 -0700

First Enterprise Application to Prove MySQL Supports Immense Scale

JAVAONE?San Francisco, Calif. - News Release:

Today at JavaOne, Hyperic (Booth #1028), announced the results of a large scale performance study on Hyperic using Sun Microsystems? MySQL database as a backend.
Results showed Hyperic monitoring upwards of 2.3 million metric transactions per minute.
These results definitively prove that MySQL and Hyperic can be a compelling option for even the most demanding enterprise and web applications.
Hyperic customer CNET was part of large-scale beta testing of MySQL on Hyperic.

About the tests:

The tests simulated a large-scale deployment monitoring 32,000 services across 675 discreet managed platforms.
There were two primary tests?designed to determine the actual and maximum loads amount of metrics per minute that Hyperic is capable of running on MySQL.
- In the Actual Load test, Hyperic HQ averaged 220,000 metrics per minute, with minimal server load for either Hyperic HQ or MySQL.
- In the Maximum Load test, Hyperic HQ achieved a record 2.3 million metrics per minute, with constraints on the Hyperic Server and only moderate load on MySQL.

The test setup used standard hardware that would typically be used to run Hyperic HQ with MySQL
- The Hyperic HQ Server ran on a 2 Quad Core, 2GHz machine with 16 GB of RAM, 4 GB of Heap and a NIC with a 1 GB interconnect between HQ and MySQL
- The MySQL Database Server ran on a 2 Quad Core, 1596 MHz machine with 8 GB of RAM, 4.5 GB InnoDB buffer pool, 16 thread concurrency, O_DSYNC flush method, and RAID-1 146G SAS 3G HardDrives

Supporting Quotes:

“For growing web-driven companies, scaling their web applications is critical to their business. Traffic is unpredictable and can grow exponentially. Operations teams must not only monitor every component of their application stack, but quickly respond if things go wrong. These performance results prove that the combination of Hyperic and MySQL is a good fit for companies that need a massively scalable web infrastructure.? — Paul Melmon, senior vice president of engineering at Hyperic

?MySQL has been designed and optimized to handle the fast-growth and high-traffic requirements of today?s modern online applications. As Hyperic is also targeting this same Web audience, there is a natural synergy between our products. MySQL and Hyperic address enterprise-level needs for performance, scalability, availability and reliability.? –Zack Urlocker, vice president of products, Sun Microsystems Database Group

“Support for MySQL has proven to be a major win for Hyperic customers by offering a scalable, enterprise class data store with the array of features they demand to handle reliable backup, archive, and disaster recovery of the highly valuable data Hyperic HQ captures. Since the official release in late January, we’ve had about a quarter of our Enterprise customers either migrate or express interest in migrating to MySQL as a database backend.” –Marty Messer, director of customer success at Hyperic

Supporting resources:

MySQL Performance study

More about Hyperic HQ More on MySQL?s new 5.1 version

More about JavaOne

Hyperic?s History with MySQL

The Open Source Free Lunch

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 21:15:59 -0700

Yesterday I had the opportunity to listen to Marten Mickos deliver the opening keynote at the MySQL conference here in Santa Clara. As usual, Marten does an enviable job at delivering a presentation which talks about MySQL’s business, its new relationship with Sun Microsystems, and what this all has to do with Open Source.

I’ve been lucky to hear Marten speak at a number of events, and have found that one of the most consistent themes can be distilled down to this (which we at Hyperic fully subscribe to):

Build a great product, Empower your Users, Build a great business

He also reiterated the importance of the GPL as an essential element to drive empowerment of users. This lets them adopt products and participate while creating an opportunity for businesses to deliver value people are willing to pay for. A virtuous cycle, right? Sun seems to think so also (a billion dollars is not the type of money any company throws around lightly)

Ironically, as I was in the middle of writing this post, Slashdot’s editors let out this gem in a post claiming that MyS^H^H^HSun had “begun to close source MySQL”. Luckily, Marten was able to set the knee-jerk cable-news-inspired Slashdot post straight by again explaining to the readers that MySQL is a business which has been able to build a great free, open, GPL database by creating value they don’t necessarily give away. He’s candid about the fact that they are experimenting trying to arrive at the best business model that balances all the elements of the above equation. Obviously, it’s not easy and someone’s undoubtedly going to get upset with the result. Apparently some people on Slashdot think MySQL’s database is written by monks who are morally opposed to any compensation.

Why is this important? Well, because software doesn’t build itself. Another admirable (if slightly more outspoken) guy named Marc Fleury made a big point of that with JBoss’ “Professional Open Source” business model. Everyone got what they wanted: the community got a great, free, open J2EE app server, and JBoss got paid to hire more people to continue to build it.

Recently there were a few examples of failed companies in the management space which either directly used open source or had some connection to it in their businesses. Many wonder if the failure had something to do with open source, their choice of license, or the business model. Few (if any) looked at the more obvious part: the products offered by those companies. Just because something is free and open source, it doesnt mean people will flock to it. Without that first element of the equation, there’s no adoption and no opportunity to create value people will pay for. The result is a failed business. The formula for creating that value is still being developed and is different for every company. We’ve chosen one which so far has brought us much success, but might not work for others.

Much like MySQL, we’re eager to experiment with different ways in which we can deliver the best products to the largest audiences while delivering financial success for our employees and investors. Over the course of this year, you’ll see us continue to enhance and deliver more features and functionality to our open source platform, while continuing to enhance the value of our various subscription offerings. Also like MySQL, we’re eager to engage our community directly as we experiment and learn how to continue to build the best solution to managing large scale web infrastructure.

Calling All Beta Testers: New Beta of HQ 3.2 Available

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 17:06:16 -0800

The 4th beta for Hyperic HQ 3.2 has been released! We’re about to wrap up the HQ 3.2 beta process, so if you haven’t kicked the tires yet, you have a limited time to do so. Speak now or forever hold your peace.

See the release notes:
http://support.hyperic.com/confluence/display/DOC/HQ+3.2+Release+Notes

Download here:
http://www.hyperic.com/downloads/dl-hq-beta.html

After downloading, share your experience on the forums:
http://forums.hyperic.com/jiveforums/forum.jspa?forumID=1

-Hyperic Team
Read the press release:
http://www.hyperic.com/blog/hyperic/2007/11/27/hyperic-hq-32-beta-now-available/

HQ 3.2 is a significant achievement by Hyperic, with some great new features:

Live Exec Data - Instantly see your most CPU intensive processes (top), disk usage, network connections and more across your entire cluster of Windows and *nix platforms in a single view!
Currently Down Resources - This quick look screen gives users the ability to view all down resources and their length of down time at a glance in one page. The view can be more narrowly filtered by generic or specific resource type, and can also be sorted by resource name, type, exact down time, and length of down time.
Nagios Import Utility - This new utility automatically imports Nagios hosts, commands and service object. This utility provides administrators currently using Nagios easy access to all the custom checks and configuration currently supported in their Nagios environment, while extending all the additional benefits and features of the Hyperic HQ platform to these users with the click of a button.
Improved Nagios Integration - The Hyperic HQ 3.2 Nagios plugin has been extended significantly to provide Nagios administrators the ability to run Nagios plugins natively and view Nagios Services, Hosts, and Statuses in a way that is identical to the Nagios Service Details interface.

Additionally, we’ve significantly upgraded HQ’s infrasctructure:

Scalability Improvements ? Hyperic aims to provide the most scalable systems monitoring and management software available in open source with Hyperic HQ 3.2. Significant investment in powering more concurrent checks, collecting more log data, and increasing the database performance for both queries and data insertion will demonstrate immediate results for large scale enterprises. Significant benchmark testing will be conducted in parallel with this Beta, and results will be shared.
MySQL Database Support - Full support for MySQL database to be used as backend data store for Hyperic HQ 3.2, leveraging the proliferation of MySQL in the enterprise and existing DBA expertise. The performance of MySQL is expected to be on par with the other backend databases we currently support: Oracle, and Postgres.
HQ Health Check ? The Hyperic HQ Server now supports self-diagnostics on the performance of the server itself, providing users and Hyperic Support a better way to be assured their monitoring system is always available.
Global Alert Disable - For scheduled maintenance or planned outages, the HQ administrator can globally disable all alerts on-demand in HQ 3.2, thereby preventing unwanted alerts from being generated during these times.

Download the beta!
http://www.hyperic.com/downloads/dl-hq-beta.html

Hyperic HQ 3.2 Beta Now Available

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 10:09:22 -0800

The first release of Hyperic HQ 3.2 Beta is now available for download. This exciting new release is designed to provide a more powerful ?single pane of glass? to monitor, diagnose and manage today?s complex, custom, web-based IT environments. In addition, significant infrastructure enhancements to the core Hyperic HQ platform were added to deliver the most scalable and manageable enterprise monitoring software available in open source.

New Diagnostics and Visibility
Today?s IT administrators deal with an increasing burden of disparate technologies, and changing resources to monitor and maintain. Typically, they rely on a variety of utilities and diagnostic tools to ensure and restore availability to their systems. Hyperic HQ 3.2 introduces three new capabilities that provide both new and existing users of HQ a single console to manage all layers of their infrastructure:

Live Exec Data ? Instantly see your most CPU intensive processes (top), disk usage, network connections and more across your entire cluster of Windows and *nix platforms in a single view!
Currently Down Resources ? This quick look screen gives users the ability to view all down resources and their length of down time at a glance in one page. The view can be more narrowly filtered by generic or specific resource type, and can also be sorted by resource name, type, exact down time, and length of down time.
Nagios Import Utility ? This new utility automatically imports Nagios hosts, commands and service object. This utility provides administrators currently using Nagios easy access to all the custom checks and configuration currently supported in their Nagios environment, while extending all the additional benefits and features of the Hyperic HQ platform to these users with the click of a button.
Improved Nagios Integration ? The Hyperic HQ 3.2 Nagios plugin has been extended significantly to provide Nagios administrators the ability to run Nagios plugins natively and view Nagios Services, Hosts, and Statuses in a way that is identical to the Nagios Service Details interface.

More Scalable, Manageable Infrastructure
Hyperic HQ users run some of the largest website and web applications in the world. Providing monitoring and management capablities at this scale can be a daunting task, but it doesn?t have to be. Hyperic HQ 3.2 introduces powerful infrastructure enhancements to ensure maximum visibility with minimum overhead:

Scalability Improvements ? Hyperic aims to provide the most scalable systems monitoring and management software available in open source with Hyperic HQ 3.2. Significant investment in powering more concurrent checks, collecting more log data, and increasing the database performance for both queries and data insertion will demonstrate immediate results for large scale enterprises. Significant benchmark testing will be conducted in parallel with this Beta, and results will be shared.
MySQL Database Support - Full support for MySQL database to be used as backend data store for Hyperic HQ 3.2, leveraging the proliferation of MySQL in the enterprise and existing DBA expertise. The performance of MySQL is expected to be on par with the other backend databases we currently support: Oracle, and Postgres.
HQ Health Check ? The Hyperic HQ Server now supports self-diagnostics on the performance of the server itself, providing users and Hyperic Support a better way to be assured their monitoring system is always available.
Global Alert Disable - For scheduled maintenance or planned outages, the HQ administrator can globally disable all alerts on-demand in HQ 3.2, thereby preventing unwanted alerts from being generated during these times.

This release is intended for early preview and community participation in perfecting this release. It is not recommended to replace your current HQ production environments. The GA release of Hyperic HQ 3.2 will be available later this winter and will support a direct upgrade from your current Hyperic HQ 3.x environment. For more information on the Hyperic HQ 3.2 Beta see the release notes. Download today and be sure to participate in our user forums and bug forums.

Expanded Community Rewards Program
To encourage the community even further to participate in improving the quality of both the new Hyperic HQ 3.2 Beta, as well as Hyperic HQ installations in production today, we have extended the Hyperic Community Rewards Program. The program now provides members new points awarded for identifying new bugs, fixing reported bugs and contributing new plugins or HOWTOs for the HQ platform. Various rewards are available to power users who contribute at significant levels.

?Gatekeepers of the Datacenter? vs. Freedom of choice in IT

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 22:27:32 -0800

I’ve written in the past about how enterprise management vendors can act as “Gatekeepers of the Datacenter” by virtue of what technologies they do or don’t support as part of their management solutions. This rather lame dynamic is a big part of the reason why a lot of otherwise great technologies dont make it all the way into the traditional enterprise.

The problem gets further compounded when one of these “Gatekeepers” is also a platform or stack vendor. See, it’s hard to resist the temptation of delivering the absolute best management for IBM products from a Tivoli solution while shortchanging non-IBM ones. Or, to lay this on one of the aspiring members of the big 4… how about getting support for SQL Server on Oracle’s Enterprise Manager. Hmmm… I’m gonna guess it sucks because Oracle wants you using their database. Besides, who uses OEM that isnt already an Oracle db customer?

Lucky for us, Hyperic has always aspired to be a completely independent management software company. We figure its important for us to deliver the best management solution for whatever technology you’ve chosen. Case in point, Mosso, a Hyperic enterprise customer was recently interviewed regarding their use of virtualization technology from VMWare. The key point from this interview was the fact that they’re open to switching to a different virtualization platform based on their requirements. Lucky for them, Hyperic will be delivering Xen support (as well as OracleVM) as soon as the Xen folks finalize their management API’s (c’mon guys, we’ve been waiting a long time) so their management solution will be in lockstep with their technology choices.

Hyperic Hint #1: Fixing Transaction ID Wraparound Failures in built-in HQDB

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 11:12:17 -0800

The built-in HQ database is PostgreSQL. Recently, users have been discovering PostgreSQL has a certain limitation: it will not execute more than 2 billion transactions between vacuums. In rare cases, an HQ built-in database can get into this state.

If this happens, the database will stop accepting connections and HQ, which needs a data store, will obviously cease to operate properly. The immediate symptom will be that users will not be able to log in to HQ and the message displayed on the screen will be The backend datasource is unavailable.

That error is not enough to say for sure that the problem is PostgreSQL avoiding wraparound failure by not accepting connections. A quick look at the hqdb.log can confirm. The telltale log entries look like this:
FATAL: database is not accepting commands to avoid wraparound data loss in database "postgres" HINT: Stop the postmaster and use a standalone backend to vacuum database "postgres".

Happily, postgres tells you how to solve the problem. It’s not very specific, though so I’ll add some details.

The first thing to do is immediately shut HQ down (including the built-in database). Next, start just the database in single-user mode. Technically, you only really need to run a VACUUM, but since we’re here, we might as well be thorough and run VACUUM FULL ANALYZE.

I’ve created a script to start the built-in HQ database in single-user mode. It’s a slightly modified version of the db-start.sh script that is included in HQ installations. It takes one argument which is the name of the database to start up. The database name to VACUUM is specified in the hqdb.log message (it is “postgres” in the message above). Start the database with the script and you will get dropped into the psql command line. Run the VACUUM and exit. Looks something like this:
$ bin/db-start-single-user-8.1.sh postgres PostgreSQL stand-alone backend 8.1.2 backend> VACUUM FULL ANALYZE; VACUUM backend>

When it’s done, you send an EOF (usually control-D) to exit the shell and shut down the database. At this point, you’re done and you can start HQ normally. Things will work and will usually perform much faster.

For more information on this PostgreSQL, check their documentation on how to avoid running into it to begin with.

Thanks, Oracle

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 20:24:00 -0800

Normally I don’t make a point of calling out other vendors by name, but this time I can’t resist. See, Oracle’s big party-turned-conference is this week. “Larry-fest” — I’ve heard it called by some cynics. I believe the tagline is something to the effect of “100,000 reasons to say thank you.” Thank you indeed, Oracle. Thanks for closing down a whole frickin street 3 WHOLE DAYS BEFORE your database love fest and creating 4 more extra days of traffic. Lucky for us, Hyperic is a few blocks away and gets to enjoy the fruits of Oracle’s closure of Howard St. between 3rd & 4th here in San Francisco. Why did they close it? Well, to say THANK YOU to all the people who pay them tons of money… none of which apparently plan on driving in SOMA for a few days!

Friday night, while I was sitting in all-out gridlock in SOMA trying to leave work I couldnt help but thing what a stupid use of money that is, and how obnoxious it is for a company (and a city) to agree to such a lavish and incredibly inconvenient thing. What a waste of money.

What Vendor is Primed for Open Source World Domination?

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 12:14:37 -0700

It’s a question we all wonder. Who will prove their technology team can crank out the best efforts in the industry? Who will be recognized for thier prowess in this fast-moving industry of open source software? To answer this question, we have devised an extremely competitive gauntlet to decide.

The showdown begins tomorrow at 5:30 Pacific. At the end of the contest, we will know for certian who will take the title of open source world domination. Strategy, speed and general bravado will be the key ingredients needed to succeed. Trash-talking wins you extra points.

The showdown begins at 5:30 pm at Hyperic Headquarters. Wii-tennis will be the game, and there will be Guitar Hero for those less versed in the skills of tennis. For now, the folks that I know to be competing will be:

Hyperic - favored winner by far. Javier is the ringleader of this team, supported by fellow Wii Warriors Ryan Morgan, Alex Ma and Scott Feldstein.
MuleSource - Dave Rosenberg and his crew are representing. Dave is reportedly going to carry a Puerto Rican flag and sport a jumpsuit for the event. I’ll be sure to take pictures! :)
MarketCetera
JasperSoft
MySQL

I have also heard that Zimbra is collecting a team. LoopFuse is hiding in Atlanta. Alfresco caved early. Who else dares to compete? Funambol? XenSource? Vyatta? Be sure to send me your team members names so we can draw up the brackets.

Game on!

UbuntuHQ

Sun, 02 Sep 2007 18:56:41 -0700

Hyperic Releases Alfresco Plugin

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 09:53:49 -0700

Released today, administrators of the Alfresco Enterprise Content Management System now have access to a fully supported, enterprise-ready systems management solution with Hyperic HQ for Alfresco. The new Hyperic HQ plugin instantly enables HQ and Alfresco administrators to take full advantage of Hyperic?s powerful management capabilities, including auto-discovery, monitoring, complex alerting and remediation. With today’s release of the Hyperic HQ for Alfresco plugin, Hyperic HQ becomes the only monitoring system to natively support Alfresco deployments on every platform and architecture.

Enterprise Content Management ensures the quick and reliable delivery, accessibility and long-term control of the most important information assets in an enterprise. These all require a strong, reliable architecture,? said John Newton, CTO and co-founder of Alfresco Software Inc. ?Hyperic HQ?s plug in for Alfresco provides a powerful new solution to monitor Alfresco in context with all their web infrastructure components, ensuring the delivery of the right message at the right time as well as the right levels of service and availability for their web sites.?

This latest plugin reflects a concerted effort from Hyperic engineering to provide the most aggressive and expansive native product support for leading technologies in the market today. The Hyperic HQ for Alfresco plugin represents the 14^th new technology managed for Hyperic in less than 60 days.

“Hyperic is committed to delivering the most complete out-of-the-box technology support for the always-on, fast moving online services businesses,” said Doug MacEachern, CTO and co-founder of Hyperic. “Enterprise content management represents a critical component to delivering a rich user experience for any online business and an obvious next step for us to extend our complete support. We?re very pleased to extend the Alfresco users the full management and monitoring support of Hyperic HQ to ensure the overall health and availability of their web infrastructure.?

About the plugin
The new plugin monitors the health and performance of every published performance statistic for Alfresco and its infrastructure components. For a full list of management metrics see the Alfresco page on the HyperFORGE. The plugin allows Hyperic HQ to automatically discover the availability of the complete set of Alfresco components, including the web server, database backend, application server, and indexing services.

In addition to the Alfresco plugin, a Sendmail plugin was added to the HyperFORGE. See the HyperFORGE Sendmail page for further details.

Availability
The Hyperic HQ plugin for Alfresco and Sendmail are available today and are supported for all current Hyperic 3.0 releases. The plugins, along with all other supported and user contributed plugins, are available on Hyperic?s HyperFORGE.

Now Playing - HQ 3.1 Beta 1

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 15:28:36 -0700

Hyperic is happy to announce the first beta of HQ 3.1. Be sure to download the beta and give it a spin. This release will include the following new features:

Expanded Alert Features
Introduces the Alert Center for central management of alerts in a flat hierarchy, Alert Resolutions descriptions track how to resolve problems, expanded alert email detail to include indicator metric data and previous alert resolution.
Performance and Scalability Enhancements
Dramatically improves out-of-the-box scalability for large deployments.
MySQL
MySQL 5.0 and above is now a supported database backend for the Hyperic HQ environment, and the HQ plugin for MySQL has been further enhanced for greater management detail.
Embedded Contextual Help
Improved context-sensitive help detail, configurable option to display up-to-date help remotely from support.hyperic.com or locally, and local web pages can be customized and expanded for unique deployment environments.
Localizable UI
The entire Hyperic HQ UI and help pages are now customizable for users to alter or translate UI elements. Sharing of translations is encouraged through a new area on HyperFORGE.
Extended Product Coverage
The new Hyperic HQ distribution bundles support over 13 new products, including notables such as Zimbra, Informix, and OpenLDAP, now deployed in the HQ Agent by default.

3.1 Beta Resources on Hyperic.com

John Mark Walker: Now Playing - HQ 3.1 Beta 1

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 13:49:19 -0700

Hyperic is happy to announce the first beta of HQ 3.1. Be sure to download the beta and give it a spin. This release will include the following new features:

Expanded Alert Features
Introduces the Alert Center for central management of alerts in a flat hierarchy, Alert Resolutions descriptions track how to resolve problems, expanded alert email detail to include indicator metric data and previous alert resolution.
Performance and Scalability Enhancements
Dramatically improves out-of-the-box scalability for large deployments.
MySQL
MySQL 5.0 and above is now a supported database backend for the Hyperic HQ environment, and the HQ plugin for MySQL has been further enhanced for greater management detail.
Embedded Contextual Help
Improved context-sensitive help detail, configurable option to display up-to-date help remotely from support.hyperic.com or locally, and local web pages can be customized and expanded for unique deployment environments.
Localizable UI
The entire Hyperic HQ UI and help pages are now customizable for users to alter or translate UI elements. Sharing of translations is encouraged through a new area on HyperFORGE.
Extended Product Coverage
The new Hyperic HQ distribution bundles support over 13 new products, including notables such as Zimbra, Informix, and OpenLDAP, now deployed in the HQ Agent by default.

3.1 Beta Resources on Hyperic.com

Hyperic HQ plugin for Zimbra is now available

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 12:33:44 -0700

Beginning today, administrators of Zimbra Collaboration Suite, the leader in open source, next-generation email and collaboration software, now have a fully supported, enterprise-ready solution for managing their complex, mission critical environments with the general availability of Hyperic HQ plugin for Zimbra. The plugin made available by Hyperic, the leader in multi-platform, open source systems management, will allow Zimbra customers to easily monitor and manage the performance of their open source messaging and collaboration suite along with all other layers of their infrastructure.

Hyperic’s software provides unprecedented cross-stack visibility and helps enterprises to pinpoint, correct and prevent problems at every layer ? including hardware, networks, virtualization, middleware and applications. The new Hyperic HQ plugin instantly enables system administrators of Zimbra to take full advantage of Hyperic?s powerful management capabilities, including auto-discovery, monitoring, complex alerting and remediation.

“Email and collaboration are core components of running a business and we know that our customers are focused on providing the highest levels of availability for their messaging solution,? said Scott Dietzen, President and CTO of Zimbra. ?Hyperic HQ’s plug in for Zimbra provides a integrated solution to monitor Zimbra and to enable our customers to achieve a higher level of stability.”

“Hyperic is set on providing the most complete out-of-the-box technology support for the always-on, fast moving online services businesses,” said Doug MacEachern, CTO and co-founder of Hyperic. ?Email and collaboration play a pivotal role for these types of businesses to fluidly work together across geographies, teams, and topics. Now with the extra support from Hyperic HQ, Zimbra users can manage and monitor the overall health of all Zimbra deployments along with the rest of their IT systems infrastructure.?

About the plugin
The new plugin monitors the health and performance of every published performance statistic for Zimbra and its infrastructure components. For a full list of management metrics see the Zimbra wiki. The plugin allows Hyperic HQ to automatically discover the availability of the complete set of Zimbra daemons including: Zimbra Tomcat, Zimbra Logger MySQL, Zimbra MySQL, Zimbra OpenLDAP, Zimbra Cyrus SASL, Zimbra ClamAV, Zimbra Apache Httpd, Zimbra Postfix, Zimbra AMaViS, Zimbra Log Watch, Zimbra Swatch, and Zimbra MTA Config. Hyperic also supports full scale management of MySQL, Apache, Tomcat and OpenLDAP, other technologies used by Zimbra.

In addition to the Zimbra plugin, new OpenLDAP and Vyatta plugins were added to the HyperFORGE. Vyatta issued a press release this morning describing the Vyatta plugin and Hyperic?s partnership with Vyatta. For more information on the Vyatta plugin and relationship see the press release.

Availability
The Hyperic HQ plugin for Zimbra, OpenLDAP and Vyatta are available today and are supported for all current Hyperic 3.0 releases. The plugins, along with all other supported and user contributed plugins, are available on Hyperic’s HyperFORGE.

Open Source Bake-offs, and Trade-offs

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 11:51:01 -0700

NetworkWorld?s Barry Nance just posted his bakeoff of open source management tools. This test focused on the open source products available from 3 vendors, Hyperic, Zenoss and Groundwork. The test was based on functionality alone, and did not consider other specialized topics such as scalability, setup or any special management of specific technologies. In Barry?s words:

We tested each product’s ability to discover, manage, administer, monitor, report on, diagnose, troubleshoot, reset, reconfigure and secure our network devices, applications, servers and clients.

Barry?s test scored Hyperic?s Open Source software a 3.6 on a scale of 5, and in the middle of the other two vendors. (Lowest a 3.1, highest a 4). We didn?t win the clear choice award, but we?re actually very proud of this review! Why? Well, Barry spent some time with us yesterday and talked about the two things he thought we needed to succeed - group alerting and automatic control actions. When we discussed that these were in the enterprise version, he suggested we take our Enterprise software to compete in the commercial arena. (Which we will, providing the editor gives us the chance!)

Knowing this, and knowing we have even more packed into the Enterprise Extensions we?re very happy with this review. But it does beg the question ? if those features make the functionality more complete, then why are they not open source? Don?t we want to win every bake-off contest?

We?re not interested in trading off between bake-off contests and a solid business plan that has enabled us to win in the market, and the market to win with us. See, we designed HQ to be the easiest to install, fastest time-to-value, and functionally complete software on the market today. Both our open source and our enterprise subscription offerings clearly illustrate that. Our users, customers, and partners agree. In fact, a lot of commercial open source projects out there make money on manageability of their systems, like JBoss, MySQL and MuleSource who all use Hyperic to provide value to their users.

So we are not bummed we didn?t win. It?s our plan to be an innovative, focused open source software provider for systems management that provides the absolute best-in-class software for the demanding scale and complexity of online services businesses. Our open source users can get a complete systems and application management solution up and running quickly ? and when they get to an appropriate level of scale (usually in excess of 100 machines), it actually becomes more cost effective to engage us for our subscription offering which is tailored specifically for their needs and provides the fastest time to value in the business. And even with the paid-for software, it?s still the most cost effective, comprehensive, and downright sexy software they can own in this space. Period. And being cost-effective for our customers means that we get paid, and ensures our open source?s projects longevity and ensuring the advancement and sophistication of the software for our customers. It?s a fundamental principle of our business plan which ensures that everyone in the Hyperic ecosystem is a winner. Go ask our ever-growing community of users and customers if you’re curious.

Hyperic HQ ?Premium Certified? with EnterpriseDB

Wed, 21 Feb 2007 16:32:56 -0800

We just received word from the fine folks at EnterpriseDB they they have certified their database product for use with Hyperic HQ. Previously, we certified only Oracle and PostgreSQL as database backends. This is not to be confused, by the way, with database products we enable our customers to monitor and manage. That list runs the gamut from MySQL and PostgreSQL to Oracle and DB2. One of our core principles has always been to give our customers the choice of what technologies they want to use, and certifying more databases for HQ is another step in that direction.

SourceForge.net: Hyperic HQ

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 14:07:29 -0800

SourceForge.net: Hyperic HQ

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 14:01:55 -0800

MuleSource Chooses Hyperic to Add Management Capability to ESB Platform

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 15:20:27 -0800

You can find the press release here. You may have noticed that multiple companies have now decided to add Hyperic technology to their enterprise offerings. It turns out that integrated management capabilities are a big deal. Who knew? Those rascally IT ops managers don’t want to add anything to their data center that’s going to increase their pain. “What can we do,” they are thinking, “to minimize the amount of time we need to manage new stuff that’s added.” It turns out to be a pretty compelling argument when you can tell a potential customer that, not only is your software cheaper, better, faster, etc., but it also comes with a management platform that can a.) easily manage your deployment of X and b.) integrate with your existing infrastructure, if so desired.

Hyperic Gives ISVs Enterprise-Class IT Management Capability with New OEM Partner Program

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 06:22:38 -0800

JBoss, MySQL first to integrate Hyperic technology into their offerings

SAN FRANCISCO - October 30, 2006 - Hyperic Inc., the leader in multi-platform, open-source IT management, today announced a partner program that enables independent software vendors (ISVs) to add enterprise-class, multi-platform IT management capabilities to their products. MySQL and JBoss are among the first companies to join the Hyperic Embedded Management program and distribute the Hyperic HQ management platform as part of their open-source offerings.

The Hyperic Embedded Management program makes it easy for software vendors to enhance their offerings with the addition of enterprise-class management functionality. Hyperic’s management software uses a single interface to obtain system data across virtually any platform. This gives customers the ability to integrate HQ into their existing - and future - mixed-stack environments and discover and fix potential problems before they can impact critical business functions.

Hyperic’s cross-platform SIGAR API enables MySQL Enterprise to obtain low-level operating system information across a variety of different platforms ? through a single interface. This serves as one important data point for monitoring and managing the health of MySQL database servers. MySQL Enterprise then acts as a “Virtual DBA”, giving IT departments the ability to understand and solve potential problems before they impact critical business applications.

“Adding the functionality of Hyperic HQ into open source infrastructure products like MySQL and JBoss gives their customers a more complete, open source solution,” said Javier Soltero, CEO of Hyperic. “They get the additional benefits of Hyperic’s enterprise-class IT management platform, making it easy for users to monitor and manage all IT operations from a single portal.”

Commercial ISVs can begin evaluating the capabilities of Hyperic HQ management platform by downloading the open source HQ at www.hyperic.com/downloads/. The Hyperic program also provides partners with joint sales and marketing opportunities, and more.

In addition to its embedded partners, Hyperic’s partner ecosystem includes XenSource and EnterpriseDB, among others.

Hyperic HQ is the industry’s most comprehensive offering for managing any type of software stack?whether it’s an open source LAMP stack, a closed source stack, or a hybrid. Unlike traditional management solutions, Hyperic HQ monitors virtually all kinds of operating systems, web servers, app servers and database servers, and can be extended to monitor most types of applications?both at a technical and business level.

About Hyperic Inc.
Hyperic (www.hyperic.com), The Open Source IT Management Platform, provides systems administrators with IT management software they don’t have to manage. Hyperic is the only open source IT management solution that provides “mix and match” stack management by discovering, monitoring, analyzing and controlling all open source and commercial enterprise IT assets from a unified Web interface. With the industry’s fastest time-to-deployment, and extensible management, Hyperic’s HQ Management Platform has been adopted by enterprises of all sizes, including Hi5 Networks, Ogilvy & Mather, eHarmony.com, and more. Founded in 2004 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Hyperic is a private company funded by Benchmark Capital and Accel Partners.

###

Adventures in Open Source » Blog Archive » “Open Source” is not a Marketing Term

Fri, 23 Jun 2006 16:26:21 -0700