Xplat Xperts

New BridgeWays Betas: WebSphere, WebLogic and Generic JVM monitoring with SCOM

Some great news from the BridgeWays side of things, we just released 3 new Beta management packs:

• BridgeWays Management Pack for WebSphere Application Servers
• BridgeWays Management Pack for WebLogic Servers
• BridgeWays Template for Java Attributes

These 3 MPs all use our JMX collector technology that allows us to connect to and consume data from JEE servers that is exposed via JMX.  The template is very exciting because it allows you not only to monitor generic JVMs, but it also allows you to consume any MBean no matter what the JVM and that means you can start to monitor the JMX instrumented application running on top of the common JEE servers like JBoss, WebSphere, WebLogic and even Tomcat.

The WebSphere and WebLogic MPs provide you with preconfigured monitoring on the application servers, pulling in the server load, JDBC connections, thread pools and other metrics required to ensure the JEE servers are healthy.

 

The Java Template MP can be used along side the JEE Application server MP or to discover and configure monitoring of any generic JVM.  The MP includes a standard SCOM template that you can use to specify mbean attributes to monitor and build performance views for.
 
If you are interested in more information on these new MPs, please contact sales@bridgeways.ca

SCOM - BridgeWays Management Pack Videos: Apache HTTP and IBM DB2

And the list of videos continues to grow, you can now watch videos for Apache HTTP and IBM DB2 management packs.

Apache HTTP:

IBM DB2:

SCOM - BridgeWays Management Pack Videos: VMware ESX, JBoss AS and Oracle DB

We've recently started to build out some nice overview videos of the BridgeWays management packs, you can find the first three on YouTube and higher resolution versions will be available at www.bridgeways.ca soon.

Introduction to monitoring Oracle Databases

Introduction to monitoring VMware ESX 3.x and vSphere

Introduction to monitoring JBoss Application Servers

GateWays servers with Operations Manager 2007 R2

Working with Gateway servers can be pretty frustrating the first time out, you really need to read through all the documented steps before you dive in. 

The main steps to watch are:

1. Use Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.GatewayApprovalTool.exe before you install the gateway
2. Generate the certifcates through your CA for each management server and the gateway server,  then import them using MOMCertImport.exe
3. After importing the certifcates, you may need to restart the Health Services in order to pick up the new certifcates

The other thing to keep in mind is that for any managed object being handled by a Gateway server the Gateway is responsible to handling the workflows, so this means you need to:

1. configure winrm to handle basic authentication (winrm set winrm/config/client/auth @{Basic="true"})
2. ensure the Gateway can resolve a DNS name for the IP of the server being discovered
3. If you are using the BidgeWays Unix/Linux deployment mechanism ensure you run the installer on the Gateway server so that the deployment packages are available for use.

The entire deployment procedure is available through technet at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb432149.aspx and once you get things running it works very well in terms of being able to monitor your unix/linux (and windows of course) servers running int he DMZ or across the WAN.

Microsoft working with Xandros to manage NATO's heterogeneous systems across a large distributed network environment

I find it kind of ironic that my first blog post will actually be about someone else's blog post.  Before I get into the details I will provide a brief introduction.  My name is Morgan Holm and I am the Senior Product Marketing Manager for BridgeWays.  Before joining Xandros I was a Senior Product Manager with NetPro Computing managing several management solutions for security and compliance such as NetPro Directory Analyzer, Directory Troubleshooter, GPOADmin, LogADmin, ReportADmin and SelfServiceADmin among others.

The blog post I'm referring to is by Claudio Caldato, a Senior Program Manager in the Interoperability Technical Strategy team at Microsoft.  His post found here, goes into the work that Xandros with BridgeWays Management Packs and Microsoft did together creating a "Multi-Platform Systems Management Lab" in response to some members of the Interoperability Executive Customer Council and in particular NATO.  This work has been documented at Interop Vendor Alliance (IVA) and there is a white paper that further discusses the architecture and scenarios.

Architecture Image from IVA website

I am very excited to see the positive response to the BridgeWays management packs and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager solution especially considering our MPs were only in beta at the time.  We have now released our first wave of BridgeWays Management Packs for VMware, Oracle Database, MySQL, JBoss AS and Apache HTTP.  We are working on our next round of MPs that we will announce at TechEd EMEA in Berlin this fall.

Thanks,

Morgan