SYSTEMS MANAGEMENTAgentless Monitoring of <strong>Dell</strong> <strong>Power</strong>Edge ServersUsingMercury SiteScopeMercury SiteScope software is an agentless, end-to-end infrastructure performance andavailability monitoring tool. It can help organizations to keep their IT infrastructure—including<strong>Dell</strong> <strong>Power</strong>Edge servers—up and running. This article provides an overview of MercurySiteScope, including information about the solution’s conformance to the Intelligent PlatformManagement Interface (IPMI) specification, and explains how SiteScope can be used tomanage <strong>Dell</strong> servers.BY BILL FITZGERALD AND BOB UREIn today’s organizations, IT systems play a missioncriticalrole. Operations groups must be able to ensurethat the enterprise’s core business applications are constantlyavailable to users worldwide. To accomplish thisgoal, IT teams require cost-effective, rapidly deployablemonitoring solutions that can help ensure uptime and maximizethe performance of a company’s IT infrastructure.The IT industry’s earliest systems monitoring solutionswere agent-based. With this type of architecture,an additional piece of software, or agent,is installed andrun on the physical production system that is being monitored.Once this agent is installed and configured properly,it monitors only the system on which it resides foruptime and performance, and then sends information onthe system’s performance metrics to an alerting consoleor central monitoring server.Though agent-based monitoring solutions may beeffective for some implementations including mainframeenvironments, they add a level of complexity, cost, andoverhead that is not suitable for many environments—especially large, complex, distributed applications.The evolution to agentless monitoringIT management technologies have steadily evolved sincethe earliest agent-based solutions. Today’s IT systems aretypically based on multitiered, distributed, and clusteredinfrastructures, which often consist of hundreds if notthousands of physical systems. These complex environmentsare not adequately served by agent-based monitoringsystems, primarily because of an agent’s intrusivenessand its cost to install and maintain. An effective monitoringsolution must be easy to deploy and provide lowtotal cost of ownership (TCO) as well as high return oninvestment (ROI).Agentless monitoring enables operations groups tomonitor complex, distributed systems without installing62POWER SOLUTIONS Reprinted from <strong>Dell</strong> <strong>Power</strong> <strong>Solutions</strong>, February 2005. Copyright © 2005 <strong>Dell</strong> Inc. All rights reserved. February 2005
SYSTEMS MANAGEMENTagents or software on the production systems. Agentless monitoringsolutions are designed to nonintrusively monitor all parts ofthe IT system remotely from a single host system, creating a widevariety of benefits that help lead to higher ROI, including:• Enabling rapid deployment: Whereas agent-based monitoringsystems can be time-consuming to install and configure,often requiring the assistance of engineers andexperts, agentless monitoring solutions can be deployed ata much more accelerated pace. To monitor multiple systemswith an agent-based solution, operations groups haveto install and configure agents on every system. Bycontrast, an agentlesssolution is installed onlyonce on a host system,and then configured toconnect remotely to monitoreach system in the ITenvironment.• Easing maintenance andupgrades: With an agentbasedsolution, it takes ateam of experts to maintainand reconfigure allof the agents on everysystem as monitoringrequirements evolve andchange. When upgradesto a newer version of theagent are required, themaintenance team hasto visit every productionserver and upgradeeach agent individually. This amount of effort dramaticallyincreases the TCO of monitoring software. In contrast, if amonitor needs to be reconfigured or the software needs tobe upgraded for an agentless solution, one IT staff membercan accomplish the task with minimal effort because allmonitoring resides on a single, central server.• Reducing the risk of affecting production systems: Installingan agent on a production system means adding a newvariable to the risk matrix by increasing the complexityand functional interoperability among all installed components.Often, the agent’s intrusiveness causes the very performancedegradation that it was intended to detectand alert upon.SiteScope can provide<strong>Dell</strong> customers with anend-to-end solution thatis designed to consolidate<strong>Dell</strong> OpenManage, IPMI,application, transaction,and core infrastructurehealth and performanceinformation into one easilymanaged console.Consider a database server that is being monitoredby an agent. The agent could consume CPU and memoryresources while filling disk space through log-file dataaccumulation. As a result, the agent could be the directcause of a performance slowdown or a server crash.Agentless solutions do not require any installation of softwareon production systems. Because they are nonintrusive,agentless monitoring solutions help mitigate the riskof being the actual cause of performance degradation orsystem failure.• Allowing for system infrastructure and expansion:Early mainframe or custom client/server environmentswere fairly static by nature. Once a mainframe wasdeployed or an application developed in-house was online,the infrastructure remained unchanged for long stretchesof time. In contrast, a huge benefit of distributed systemsrunning Web, enterprise resource planning (ERP), customerrelationship management (CRM), or e-mail applications isthat they can be easily expanded to accommodate growthand scale accordingly.Many successful online retail applications experiencethe addition of tens of servers every week and the changingof application code daily. Agent-based monitoringsolutions often require experts to install and configure anagent on each additional system or application componentbrought online. However, with an agentless solution, theIT staff can simply point to the additional servers, deploythe preconfigured monitoring template, and begin monitoringimmediately.As a result of the preceding features and benefits, agentlessmonitoring can lead to increased ROI over agent-basedapproaches by significantly reducing TCO. In this way, agentlessmonitoring enables IT and operations groups to spend moretime building and improving production systems and less timemonitoring them.Mercury SiteScope for agentless monitoringMercury SiteScope is an agentless monitoring tool designed to ensurethe availability and performance of distributed IT infrastructures,including servers, operating systems, network devices, network services,applications, and application components. This proactive,Web-based infrastructure monitoring solution is lightweight andhighly customizable—and it does not require high-overhead agentson production systems.Understanding how it worksMercury SiteScope’s agentless architecture is designed to give administratorsa centralized view of infrastructure monitoring without theneed to install agents or software on production systems. SiteScopewww.dell.com/powersolutions Reprinted from <strong>Dell</strong> <strong>Power</strong> <strong>Solutions</strong>, February 2005. Copyright © 2005 <strong>Dell</strong> Inc. All rights reserved. POWER SOLUTIONS 63
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