Overview

Entuity has a deserved reputation as an innovative leader in the development of infrastructure management solutions. In 2002 Entuity delivered with the introduction of a highly configurable architecture. The strength of this architecture to our customers is two-fold:

• it allows Eye of the Storm to remain an out-of-the-box product, with ease of use and low training costs combined with real strength in returning and presenting valuable infrastructure management information.
• it allows Eye of the Storm to be highly configurable. If you want to add new functionality, for example monitor a particular component of a device, display inventory information, add new events for that component and build new reports then you can.

Listed here are some of the Eye of the Storm key underlying technologies and concepts. They indicate why Eye of the Storm is a best of breed solution and how Entuity intends keeping it that way:

• Flexible Architecture, Eye of the Storm's highly configurable architecture.
• IT Infrastructure Discovery, powerful and automatic discovery of your network assets
• Topology, a powerful real-time application for visually understanding network relationship
• Beyond Root-Cause Analysis, detecting the true cause of network events
• Multi-threaded Packet Stuffing, more details, less network burden.

If you require more detail on the technologies identified here, or how Eye of the Storm can be applied to solve your infrastructure management problems, please contact Entuity.

Eye of the Storm's Architecture

Underpinning the core delivery of Eye of the Storm's data gathering, storage and presentation services is a flexible architecture, customizable via control files, rather than source code changes. Flexibly defined data management, processing, analytic and retention settings have also been combined with an automatically accommodating GUI client and an XSL/XML script-configured reporting engine to provide the basis for supporting network and IT systems into the future.

The data management kernel (DMK) provides a centralized information repository for the storage and retrieval of many types of data for many types of consumers, allowing for the presentation of both real-time and historical (report-based) data. Key concepts include:

• Extensibility - allows for user-defined data gathering methodologies, user-defined object modeling, and user-defined time-series data storage.
• Flexibility - Because DMK is data agnostic, it is also vendor and technology agnostic as well, and as such can be applied to any IT environment.
• Rapid Time to Value - DMK delivers simple installation and configuration capabilities for rapid deployment.
• Future Proof - Since DMK is readily adaptable to next generation technologies, it embraces a long-term strategic approach to managing IT environments.

Reasons Why the Architecture is Important to You

• Entuity's market responsiveness is heightened as development time for new Eye of the Storm functionality is shortened.
• COM API allows you to build reports and dashboards that access Eye of the Storm's database in real-time.

IT Infrastructure Discovery

Eye of the Storm has a fully automatic device discovery capability, with out-of-the-box support for 400 devices. Entuity's Automatic Device Mapper allows support of hundreds of additional devices through recognizing devices through their attributes.

The discovery process can be restricted to various classes of IP subnets, and uses various techniques, including ICMP ping, SNMP Get, and TCP port probing to discover the IT infrastructure and its applications.

Application discovery is through matching discovered attributes with defined application types.

Once an entity has been discovered, its properties (port, VLAN, module, chassis information, etc.) are added to a centralized database to build up a centralized repository of management information. Eye of the Storm builds a model of the managed entities that are dependent on each other to provide an end-to-end service by:

• Discovering which applications reside on which servers
• Discovering which switch ports those servers are connected to
• Discovering how the various switches and routers are connected together.

With StormWorks, Entuity now has the capability to additionally discover and add any IT infrastructure entity to the Eye of the Storm management environment, quickly and with a minimum of coding.

Beyond Root Cause Analysis

In complex networks, no fault is an island. Each creates cascades of related faults and symptoms that can quickly overwhelm the network operation center, turning screens red with undifferentiated alerts.

Root Cause Analysis was invented to make sense of the mass of error messages by calculating which ones were causes and which were symptoms. Some management tools are forced to compare 'symptom signatures' to a pre-constructed database which always needs updating. Others use complex analytical tools to deduce root causes.

Entuity's True Cause Analytics™ goes beyond the deductive process of root causes analysis by better understanding root causes at their source.

By interrogating every device more thoroughly (see Multi-Threaded Packet Stuffing) and understanding the complex relationships between devices, Entuity can identify the True Cause of every event cluster while other management tools are still trying to calculate the most likely culprits.

EYE doesn't have to deduce what it already knows,

True Cause Analytics isolates IT related problems using vector differencing. This involves the building of a dependency chain of objects and monitoring the object states in that chain. In the event of state changes (where each object state change is a vector), differencing the dependency chain state vectors enables Eye of the Storm to determine the true cause of the event. Eye of the Storm can then raise the appropriate event.

Topology and Entuity's Connectivity Viewer

The Eye of the Storm Connectivity Viewer offers a powerful real-time application for visually displaying network topological relationships to quickly assess the connectivity and impact of change alarms on the network. EYE automatically draws a device connectivity map and uniquely highlights failures, brownouts, and topological changes for rapid and efficient troubleshooting. Users can add or remove devices as desired and launch EYE’s full depth of inventory, performance, or event details. Capacity planners can also use the Connectivity Viewer to analyze existing infrastructures in order to make informed recommendations concerning new network build outs.

Used in conjunction with EYE's Component Viewer and the Bulletin Board, this new application enables on-demand display of up-to-the minute connectivity for desired network devices for trouble shooting efficiency and for capacity planning. Similar to traditional mapping technology, the Connectivity Viewer shows the relationship between devices in the network. But unlike traditional static maps, the Connectivity Viewer delivers an automatic visual change alarm display. The immediate attention brought about by these alerts and their color-coded prioritization minimizes device downtime or potential conflicts and issues of unplanned additions or changes to the network.

Export Details to Popular Documentation Formats
Any of the network details automatically captured by EYE are available for export to common word processing, documentation, and office applications. Output as XML, HTML, PDF, or CSV format, EYE helps automate many common documentation tasks to save time and increase operations efficiency. EYE provides inventory information on:

• Ports,
• Routers, Switches, Hubs, Firewalls, Gateways, Wireless Access Points and Controllers
• Business views,
• VLANs,
• Blades, Servers, and Applications.

(Click on image to enlarge)
EYE's Connectivity Viewer Enables Real-Time Trouble-Shooting

Multi-Threaded Packet Stuffing

Network management tools gather information by interrogating the Management Information Base (MIB) of each device (or deploying agents -- an expensive, high-overhead approach).

But the polling engines of most management tools are extremely inefficient because they only ask a single query for every packet they send out over the network. The more they want to know, the more traffic they generate and the more overhead they put on the network (so they tend to ask fewer queries).

A better way: Entuity's Device Polling Engine uses a technology called Multi-Threaded Packet Stuffing to dramatically increase the efficiency of data gathering. With Multi-Threaded Packet Stuffing, a single request can get 25 pieces of information - all in one packet. Here's why that's a very good thing:

• Richer queries mean better information - Entuity solutions don't only determine the state of every device, they break the device down into its individual physical and logical components, then interrogates each one individually. That's what delivers Heightened Awareness.
• Lower overhead means less drag - The idea is to keep your network and infrastructure running at peak performance, not slowing it down with a constant river of queries.
• Better efficiency means better scalability - Entuity solutions scale up as fast and as far as you like without slowing down the network.

With Multi-Threaded Packet Stuffing, a single request can get 25 pieces of information.