athene® 10.30

athene®The world’s leading companies rely on athene Capacity Management software and our consulting and training services as key elements of their IT Service Management and Service Delivery.

See Capacity and Performance across your IT enterpriseathene brings metrics from across the enterprise to one place, for you to use for reporting, planning and prediction, giving you a 360° view of your services and infrastructure.

Benefits

• Predict when, how much, and what type of additional hardware resources will be needed, minimizing outages and cost to the business.

• Less outages due to capacity issues - stay ahead of the competition by meeting your customer’s ever increasing expectations.

• More productive Capacity Management staff, as repetitive tasks can be automated freeing up skilled personnel to do more valuable work.

• Automated reports help to significantly cut down on the amount of time it takes to generate and send performance and capacity reports to your business units.

• The interface to existing framework data capture agents provides you with a better return on investment on your existing framework tools.

• Predictive modeling allows you to hypothetically change your environment and see the impact your changes will have.

Features

• Brings metrics from across the enterprise to one place (CMIS).

• Covers a all major platforms: z/OS, VMware , Hyper-V, Unix, Linux, SQL Server, HP, Oracle, IBM Tivoli, Splunk, IIS, CA, Windows , Exchange, Open VMS.

• The Integrator feature will bring any business metrics, specific to your business, in to the CMIS.

athene® ServiceView athene ServiceView provides interactive, web-based short, medium, and long-term views of performance and capacity issues across all your services, with automatic prediction of time left before any change is needed.ServiceView reporting combines the ability to group multiple servers, instances and applications into business services while displaying their associated capacity health..

Via a single pane of glass, ServiceView provides ITSM process and business proactive alerting through a combination of exception (RAG) reports and calculated “Days to Live” (DTL) values, including drill down and on-demand reporting at a touch of a button.

Benefits

• Change infrastructure in line with business impact to minimize IT infrastructure costs

• Focus technical skills on the right issues at the right time

• Ensure user satisfaction with proactive action plans to guarantee service quality

Features

• Single pane of glass gives enterprise-wide visibility of all performance and capacity issues at a service level

• Drill down to provide multi-level analysis:

• Business, Service, Component

• Business Planning – unique ‘days to live’ prediction of what will need changing and when

• to avoid service degradation

• Threshold based alerting and action plan for all components

• Visual comparison of performance across services

• Short, medium and long term views to understand performance and capacity in a business context

• Automatic maintenance of views and recommendations as new data becomes available

• ‘Line View’ gives insight into data underlying top level alerts to optimize analysis

Technical

• Define services according to your own criteria

• Traffic light / RAG (Red/Amber/Green) status for all entities at all levels:

• Business, Service, Component

• Automatic prediction against threshold on varying time scales:

• Now, 1 month, 3 month, 6 month, 12 month

athene® for CloudOne of the main reasons for moving IT to the cloud is to improve efficiency and make cost savings. Effective Capacity Management with athene is the key to ensuring that using the cloud actually pays.

When planning on moving applications or services to the cloud you need to:• Consolidate workloads, so you are not wasting valuable space

• Preview how much space an application or service will need (both now and in the future) and use this information to:

1. Assess which applications or services are best suited to a move to the cloud.

2. Compare hosting costs from different vendors based on accurate sizing.

3. Assess which vendor will best meet the long term needs of the business.

The determination of these costs and sizing the environment correctly using athene will be critical in ensuring that you only buy and use what you need, with no degradation of service.

For infrastructure you can monitor an off-premise virtual machine with athene enabling you to:

• See processes and changes in utilization, so that you can identify trends upwards and tune performance accordingly.

• View users and processes to ensure CPU utilization relates to business work and not an increase in background processing.

• Monitor memory utilization, not usually provided by vendors.

• Identify disk occupancy trends, predict future storage requirements and therefore costs.

• Collect data from cloud services providers.

Many organizations rely on cloud providers to handle their key computing and storage tasks. A variety of reasons lie behind their decision to use the cloud, the key factors being cost reduction and less kit managed internally.

• How do you know if your spend for Cloud Services is optimized?

• How do you know whether you’re actually getting what you pay for?

• How can you plan your future spend given new initiatives and growth of existing applications and services within the cloud?

athene for Cloud captures data from various cloud providers using athene Capture Packs delivered via REST and integrates key cloud metrics into athene’s enterprise-wide capacity management system.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Capture PacksAWS EC2 Capture PackAmazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides scalable computing capacity in the AWS cloud. Clients that use EC2 do so to avoid hardware costs and to reduce the need to forecast changes in traffic. The service allows, for a cost, the ability to scale up or down to handle changes in requirements or spikes in popularity.

The capacity manager needs data from the EC2 environment to evaluate its utilization and performance. The EC2 Capture Pack captures the following statistics from AWS Cloudwatch at either the Basic Monitoring or Detailed Monitoring levels:

• CPU Utilization

• Disk Read Ops

• Disk Write Ops

• Disk Read Bytes

• Network In

• Network Out

• Network Packets In

• Network Packets Out

At the Detailed Monitoring levels, higher granularity data is available, along with the ability to categorize the data in several ways:

• By Image (AMI Id)

• Per-Instance

• Across all Instances

• Aggregated by Instance Type

AWS EBS Capture PackAmazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides persistent block storage volumes for use with EC2 instances in the AWS Cloud. Each volume is automatically replicated to protect from component failure, offering high availability and durability.

Amazon offers EBS as a consistent, low-latency storage solution for scalable and tuneable applications and technologies. The capacity manager needs specific metrics from EBS to monitor and evaluate the performance of the environment.

The EBS Capture Pack captures the following statistics from AWS Cloudwatch:

• Volume Idle Time

• Volume Read Bytes

• Volume Write Ops

• Volume Read Ops

• Volume Queue Length

• Burst Balance

• Volume Write Bytes

• Volume Total Read Time

• Volume Total Write Time

• Volume Throughput Percentage (SSD Only

• Volume Consumed Read Write Ops (SSD Only)

AWS EFS Capture Pack Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) provides simple, scalable file storage for use with Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS Cloud. With Amazon EFS, storage capacity is elastic, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files, so your applications have the storage they need, when they need it.

Amazon EFS is designed for high availability and durability, and provides performance for a broad spectrum of use cases. The capacity manager needs specific metrics from EFS to monitor and evaluate the performance of the environment.

The EFS Capture Pack captures the following statistics from AWS Cloudwatch:

• Meta Data IO Bytes

• Burst Credit Balance

• Client Connections

• Permitted Throughput

• Data Write IO Bytes

• Data Read IO Bytes

• Total IO Bytes

• Percent IO Limit

Microsoft Capture PacksMicrosoft Azure Capture PackMicrosoft Azure is a cloud computing and storage service for building, deploying, and managing applications and services via a global network of Microsoft managed data centers. It provides software as a service, platform as a service, and infrastructure as a service and supports many different Microsoft and third-party technologies. The capacity manager needs data from the Azure environment to evaluate utilization and performance.

The Microsoft Azure Capture Pack captures statistics that include the following:

• [Host] Disk Read Bytes

• [Host] Disk Read Operations/Sec

• [Host] Disk Write Bytes

• [Host] Disk Write Operations/Sec

• [Host] Network In

• [Host] Network Out

• [Host] Percentage CPU

• CPU interrupt time

• CPU parking status

• CPU percentage guest OS

• CPU privileged time

• CPU user time

• Non-paged pool

• Page faults

• Paged pool

• Memory available

• Memory committed

• Memory pages

• Memory percentage

• Context switches

• Disk read guest OS

• Disk write guest OS

• SQL CPU percentage

• SQL total data file KB

• SQL total log file KB

• SQL total log file used KB

• SQL total memory KB

• SQL transaction rate

• Process total time

• Process working set

• Processes

• Processor frequency

• Processor percent perf

Data CaptureThe key prerequisite for effective Capacity Management is to have quality data available for the analyst or planner to use. With athene, this data is captured in a variety of ways at a level of granularity to meet your needs.

Agent (Acquire)athene Acquires exist for all major operating systems, including Unix, Linux, Hyper-V, VMware, z/OS, and OpenVMS. Acquires are also available for RDBMS environments and leading applications such as SQL Server, Oracle, Microsoft Exchange, and IIS.

AgentlessThere are numerous advantages to an agentless approach – among them, the ability to quickly capture data from a target. athene can process data directly from Windows/Hyper-V and from VMware.

FrameworksMany organizations have invested heavily in framework solutions which are used for many purposes, most often for real-time alerting, fault notification, and event notification. Most framework products include agents that capture performance data that can be imported into athene's CMIS.

Data can be imported from Application Performance Software and Storage devices to the athene CMIS helping to predict, detect and diagnose complex application performance problems before they impact service.

All data held within the CMIS can be exported to a Business Value Dashboard to provide quick indicators for the business.

IntegratorIntegrator Capture Packs, for the capture, storage, reporting, trending, and alerting of data from 'hard to reach' data sources. Every company has tools and platforms that store vital numeric data in log files or other sorts of text files. athene, via Integrator, can import any time-series numeric data for reporting, trending, and alerting purposes.

Integrator is athene’s open data capture interface. Use Integrator to quickly and easily snap in connectors to the various stores of unique data within your business. Automate the process of integrating any data from capture through to storage within the athene CMIS, correlation, alerting, reporting and prediction.

Capture PacksThe complex nature of the IT infrastructure means there is a need to manage many disparate systems together. We believe we have the answer with our 360° Capacity Management portfolio and our range of ‘off the shelf’ Capture Packs, see below.

We’re adding new Capture Packs to our portfolio all the time.Licensed athene users can quickly and easily create their own Capture Packs, unique to their business needs.

PredictingHaving the ability to know in advance the likely consequence of changes to the business is crucial to ensuring uninterrupted service that continues to meet agreed service levels.

"athene allows us to model what is happening without spending a lot of time, resources and money" (Section Chief, Government Agency)

There are many ways of predicting the future in capacity planning: guesswork, rule of thumb, load testing and benchmarking being a few of them. We recommend trending and modeling as the most useful, taking less time and effort than benchmarking or load testing yet still providing you with a good degree of accuracy.

TrendingTrending is great for when you need an early ‘broad brush’ estimate of the future. Automated trend reports enable comparison of the future against thresholds in order to generate alerts. athene plots and trends any one of thousands of metrics.

Clicking on a set of system data metrics allows investigation of trends in those metrics.

Some of the most popular areas to trend among athene clients are:

• System – Processor, disc, memory, caching, paging, swapping…

• User – Utilization by user, process, commands, commands per user...

• Databases – Oracle, SQL Server…

• Applications – Exchange, Internet Information Server, SAP R/3…

• Space – File system, Oracle table space…

Modelingathene provides you with strong graphical evidence of the future and can be used to compare multiple solutions.

athene quickly and easily answers ‘what if’ questions about changes in workload volumes, new applications, hardware alternatives and system management strategies. Many alternatives are readily compared side by side on simple easy to interpret graphical reports with detailed information available to support recommendations.

Predicting future system performance has challenges due to the many interacting issues: response times don’t necessarily degrade at the same rate as device utilization; users may see a different impact on their service from the same workload at different points in time. athene’s modeling understands the complexities and interdependencies between workload, devices and service levels, showing you what will be needed and when to keep user service levels consistent and acceptable over time.

Models are generated from the data held in the CMIS. A scenario facility enables you to ask multiple questions in one pass with results displayed on screen in a matter of seconds.

• Evaluate the effect of workload and hardware changes on end-user service levels.

• Identify actual and potential system bottlenecks.

• Predicts resource utilization and response times.

• Get results in seconds.

Benefits

• A pro-active approach that identifies performance problems in advance, so that action can be taken before end-user service levels are adversely affected.

• Assists in hardware budgeting and purchase justification by identifying the minimum hardware (and therefore expenditure) required to achieve target service levels.

• Provides valuable decision support during the hardware procurement and upgrade cycle.

• Ensures that all current system loads and resource demands are accounted for.

• Gives strong graphical evidence of future performance problems if hardware upgrade plans are abandoned or delayed.

ReportingIf there’s going to be a performance problem you’ll want to know in advance. athene allows you to report on the past, the present and predict the future. With athene easily create automatic reports on a schedule that's configurable and customizable.

ReportingSimple to use standard templates present key metrics, saving you the time and effort of searching for what you need. You have complete flexibility to tailor reports to your requirements and show managers or business units trends in performance quickly and simply, enabling action to be taken before problems become critical.

athene provides effective enterprise wide performance reporting with all performance data collated at a single point, delivered when and where you need it. It’s fast, flexible and clear reporting facilities allow you to look at relationships between disparate resources such as mainframes, distributed systems, networks, storage and PCs.

Features

• Automatic detection and reporting of performance problems.

• Near real-time or retrospective exception reporting.

• User defined warning and alarm thresholds.

Benefits

• Regular automatic performance reports on demand, freeing up your staff to concentrate on analysis and taking action.

• Management by exception focuses attention on systems with current or potential performance problems.

• Maintain and protect end-user service levels.

Alertingathene monitors to identify and report performance warnings and alarms by determining when and where performance parameters exceed user-defined thresholds.

You Choose

• Which systems and metrics you wish to monitor.

• Alarm and warning thresholds for each data metric.

• How often and when to check performance.

• The way in which alerts are reported.

Clicking on the Alert icon provides details of all outstanding alerts for the system. For each alert, athene tells you when the alert was triggered and what the problem was.

Features

• Automatic detection and reporting of performance problems.

• Near real-time or retrospective exception reporting.

• User defined warning and alarm thresholds.

Benefits

• Reducing system downtime.

• Maintain and protect service level agreements.

• Advance notice of potential capacity issues.

Analysisathene provides analysis of current and recent system performance identifying problems and advising what course of action is required to restore service levels.

Features

• Reports are automatically scheduled for production.

• Complete flexibility to tailor all reports.

• User defined templates are stored for re-use.

• Analyze many facets of performance data.

• Quickly home in on potential problem areas.

• Metrics are displayed, summarized and correlated with others for trending.

• Click on a set of system metrics to see and investigate trends.

• Full control of trend parameters such as time back, time forward.

• Results are saved for later examination, printing, or the data can be copied as tables or pictures into Word, Excel or PowerPoint.

Benefits

• Quick and easy-to use interface to multiple systems performance data

• Focuses attention on relevant metrics.

• Reduce support costs by automating data collection and centralized management.

• Minimize risk of performance crises.

Advisingathene's Advisor automatically provides interpretation of your performance data, adding a layer of expertise to your skilled support staff, releasing them from routine but time-consuming tasks.

Features

• Brings anomalies to attention and providing an explanation of their likely cause.

• 'Instant consultant' gives regular performance audits with no personnel resource needed to generate them.

• Expert interpretation of performance data automatically.

• Interprets reports with an indication of the divergence against the 'norm' and provides recommendations of actions to be taken.

• Automatically updates graphs at predetermined times.

• Automatically writes written interpretation of key issues, including warning of future issues and upgrade recommendations.

• ‘Out of the box’ reports providing immediate feedback on current issues.

• Exception based reports tell you what you need to know without burdening you with unnecessary data.

• ‘traffic light’ summary screen alerts you to the major problems ‘at a glance’.

Benefits

• Free up skilled support staff time.

• Automatic production of regular intelligent management information.

• No work required in order to get and interpret the data.

© MetronMetron, Metron-Athene and the Metron logo as well as athene® and other names of products referred

to herein are trade marks or registered trade marks of Metron Technology Limited. Other products and company names mentioned herein may be trade marks of the respective owners.

Any rights not expressly granted herein are reserved.

www.metron-athene.com