RoboMon monitors & manages your Windows NT/2000-based applications, systems & networks

RoboMon

RoboMon for Windows NT/2000

Overview
RoboMon monitors and manages your Windows NT/2000-based applications, systems and networks, enabling you to maintain the highest levels of eBusiness availability and performance. RoboMon detects problems, reports and graphs performance data, and centrally monitors such wide-ranging technologies as Exchange, IIS, SQL Server, Citrix, Terminal Server, Oracle, Proxy Server, Cisco, Insight Manager, Service Level Agreements, and more. RoboMon provides a unique combination of superior monitoring, unmatched scalability and ease of deployment and maintenance, to give you the best Return on Investment and the lowest Total Cost of Ownership for your IT organization.

Managing Complexity
Managing IT today is complicated. A host of new technologies provide IT organizations with the ability to leverage different software and hardware platforms for various applications.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the rapid rise of Windows NT/2000, whose versatility has led many companies to adopt it for a variety of mission critical applications. For most organizations, Windows NT/2000 now plays a major role in the enterprise, side-by-side with UNIX and other operating systems.

Better Service For Your Users
RoboMon monitors for early warning signs, and notifies you before problems interrupt your users.

The result? IT staff must deploy and support more varied and complex software and hardware technology than ever. At the same time, expectations for availability and service are at an all-time high. Companies now rely on the Internet, Intranets and Extranets, both to conduct eBusiness and also to run their own internal operations. When problems occur, they must be solved quickly and with little or no impact on users.

Quick ROI, Lower TCO
RoboMon provides superior Return on Investment (ROI) and helps you lower your Total Cost of IT Ownership (TCO):

RoboMon solves problems the same way your most expert systems administrators would -- 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This eliminates manual monitoring tasks and greatly reduces time spent on firefighting, so you can deploy personnel more effectively.

Systems running RoboMon require less attention than systems that are monitored manually or using less sophisticated software packages, because RoboMon dynamically adjusts to changes in the system and application configuration. This helps you accommodate growth without adding staff.

RoboMon provides enterprise command, control, and monitoring, so systems can be managed from anywhere. This reduces the travel and personnel costs associated with supporting remote locations.

RoboMon helps you meet Service Level Agreements, and provides graphs and reports for CIOs, IT managers and administrators. This lets you make the kind of eBusiness Infrastructure Management decisions that can give your company a competitive edge in the marketplace.

Strategic Information for Management
RoboMon provides you with the information you need to make strategic eBusiness infrastructure management decisions.

Built-In Expertise in Wide-Ranging Technologies
Heroix has embodied years of experience in Windows NT/2000, BackOffice and application administration in a suite of Intelligent Solution Sets (ISS), which RoboMon uses to detect and diagnose problems with:

Applications

Microsoft Exchange
Microsoft IIS
Microsoft SQL Server
Oracle
Service Level Agreements
Microsoft SMS
Lotus Notes/Domino

Systems

Microsoft Windows NT/2000
Microsoft Cluster Server
Microsoft Active Directory Services
Microsoft Terminal Server/Citrix Winframe
Microsoft Transaction Server
Microsoft Message Queue

Networks

Cisco devices
Microsoft Proxy Server and Client
RAS
WINS, DHCP

Hardware

Compaq Insight Manager
Dell OpenManage
HP TopTools

Integration for the Enterprise
RoboMon integrates easily with your enterprise management infrastructure, and provides coverage across your entire multi-platform eBusiness enterprise.

When RoboMon finds a problem, it can fix it automatically if you wish, or it can perform any number of notification actions, such as sending email, paging or notifying RoboMon's real time Event Monitor. RoboMon can also interface seamlessly with your own corporate messaging infrastructure, through its native SNMP support and interfaces to framework, help desk and network management products. RoboMon also provides the reports and graphs you need to document service level compliance and plan for future growth.

Easy to Deploy and Use
RoboMon's Graphical User Interface (GUI) was designed with extensive customer input, to make RoboMon easy to deploy and use. Each Intelligent Solution Set can be managed and tailored from anywhere in the Enterprise, via the RoboMon Enterprise Manager. ISS's can easily be customized and extended by systems personnel, with no programming and very little training or "ramp up" time.

In addition, the RoboMon GUI enables changes to be made on a local, domain or enterprise basis using powerful drag-and-drop operations. So ongoing administration requires very little effort, whether you are running RoboMon on 5 systems or 500 systems.

Ease of Use for IT Staff
RoboMon is easy to deploy and manage in any size environment.

Unparalleled Problem Solving Ability
Underlying the Intelligent Solution Set is RoboMon's Rule Engine. The Rule Engine is a purpose built, generalized inference engine that executes each ISS using the same steps a skilled IT professional would take in order to diagnose and solve problems. The Rule Engine and the ISS combine to form an intelligent, autonomous RoboMon monitoring agent that monitors with amazing breadth as well as depth. RoboMon’s internal data collectors enable it to monitor:

Performance counters
NT/2000 event logs
Databases
Application log files
Native NT data sources
COM (Component Object Model) objects
SNMP traps and variables
WMI (Windows Management Interface) data

Given this comprehensive data collection capability, RoboMon can check for virtually any problem you may encounter. Likewise, RoboMon's sophisticated condition-detection capabilities enable it to correlate events, investigate problems and provide staff with the detailed information required in order to solve problems quickly.

RoboMon also recognizes the difference between new and persistent problems, and can respond accordingly. For example, you may want to have RoboMon notify different people under different circumstances, or escalate problems that are not resolved immediately. This knowledge of problem history also enables RoboMon to interface transparently with the new/updated/closed construct used by most help desk systems.

Reliable, Fault Tolerant and Scalable
RoboMon's Event Architecture provides reliable, fault-tolerant delivery of events to any destination in your network, with minimal network overhead and no single point of failure. Events may even be forwarded selectively if you wish, to enable staff to focus on the events most relevant to their areas (for example, forward Exchange events to the Exchange group).

Events may be routed to a single monitoring system, or they may be routed to multiple systems to provide automatic failover. If a destination system is unreachable, the event will still be viewable elsewhere in the network. Once the destination system becomes reachable again, the event is retransmitted to guarantee delivery.

Better Results With Less Effort
RoboMon is designed to provide superior monitoring results right out of the box, with no setup required, and to require little or no ongoing administration effort. RoboMon learns about each system and application it monitors, and automatically configures its monitoring criteria and thresholds to match the workload at hand. This provides you with better alerts, both by avoiding false alarms on larger systems, and by ensuring that problems don't "fall through the cracks" on smaller systems with smaller workloads.

RoboMon also automatically adapts to changes in configuration and changes in workload. Therefore, RoboMon does not need to be adjusted whenever you add an application or make changes in your environment.

Finally, RoboMon uses an open architecture that can accept new ISS's without the need to write or debug code. Thus RoboMon can easily be extended by system administrators and other IT staff to monitor even highly site-specific situations.

The Total Heroix Solution
RoboMon for Windows NT/2000 is part of Heroix Corporation's suite of automated eBusiness Infrastructure management products designed to help you assure the highest level of application, system and network availability and performance. Built from the ground up on Windows NT/2000, RoboMon for Windows NT/2000 is fully compatible with RoboMon for UNIX and RoboMon for OpenVMS, as well as with Heroix's other offerings:

RoboCentral -- software designed to provide centralized monitoring and management of system console ports, including servers, bridges, routers and other eBusiness infrastructure components.

RoboER -- software that enables IT personnel to reach and repair Windows NT/2000 systems, anywhere in the eBusiness infrastructure, that are otherwise inaccessable and would require a costly reboot.

RoboMon for UNIX

Manage Any UNIX Environment Better
RoboMon monitors and manages your UNIX-based applications and systems, enabling you to maintain the highest levels of eBusiness availability and performance. RoboMon detects problems and centralizes the monitoring of widely distributed networks. RoboMon provides a unique combination of superior monitoring, unmatched scalability and ease of deployment and maintenance, to give you the best Return on Investment and the lowest Total Cost of Ownership for your IT organization.

UNIX Data Collector
RoboMon’s powerful native UNIX collector collects over eight hundred statistics to provide comprehensive operational and performance data in the following areas:

Configuration information domain
Individual file domain
File object domain (e.g., a set of files that make up an application)
File system domain
User domain
Group domain
Process domain
Daemons
System performance domain
Network domain (NFS, network performance, network interfaces, TCP/IP)

Built-in Rules: RoboMon Solutions
RoboMon includes comprehensive pre-defined rules called Solutions Rules, which are controlled through the Motif GUI interface. These rules detect a wide variety of common UNIX operational and performance problems. They are specifically designed to be self-configuring, so that RoboMon is fully functional "out-of-the-box". Once installed, the product is both readily tailorable and extensible, so that site-specific requirements can easily be accommodated, resulting in a comprehensive ability to perform "lights-out" operations, which is particularly crucial to global eBusiness.

All rules are provided with reasonable default values for monitoring intervals, thresholds and selections, which in most cases are user-adjustable. All built-in rules operate in advise-only mode when first installed,and offer a range of notification techniques. User-defined corrective actions can be taken if they are enabled by the user.

Automation
The comprehensive pre-defined Automation rules include operational sensors that enable the user to automate tasks, monitor and react to common problems, including:

File systems with critically low number/percentage of bytes free
Processes caught in a processing loop
Specified processes that do not exist
CPU very busy
Hosts that are not reachable via ping

Oracle (extra cost option)
RoboMon’s Oracle rules work out of the box to monitor key configuration and performance issues based on extensive advice and recommendations obtained directly from Oracle. These rules embody the expertise and problem solving skills of experienced Oracle DataBase Administrators (DBAs), to give you useful information immediately. In addition to checking basic operational issues, such as locked objects and database and log file disk space, RoboMon also addresses Oracle configuration issues, such as the size of the redo log buffer and the number of DML locks. Furthermore, RoboMon keeps an eye on Oracle performance and accessibility, and alerts you to problems such as inefficient caching or sorting, list contention, and buffer waits.

UNIX Notification Capabilities
As well as the standard notification facilities supported by RoboMon (e-mail, RoboMon Event Monitor, SNMP traps), the UNIX version also supports the following actions: