The ICT infrastructure is a significant investment for many organizations and the ongoing serviceability of this infrastructure is a critical concern in enabling businesses to execute daily operations. However, ICT infrastructures are increasingly complex configurations of internally supplied and externally sourced capability, which is distributed across multiple sites and exhibits significant interdependencies.

Problems with Traditional ICT Monitoring

ICT monitoring solutions are widely available but tend to fall into one of two categories:

• Focused on a specific set of devices, systems, or applications (for example, routers and switches or Windows desktops).
• Problem domain driven (for example, focusing on security or application performance).

Where ICT monitoring tools combine both of these features into a single tool chain, they tend to focus on the lowest common denominator, where typically the protocol-level approach is taken (for example, centered on SNMP).

Regardless of categorization, there are further systemic issues with most ICT monitoring architectures:

• The “timeout” approach to monitoring is used, which assumes that if no response is detected from a monitored infrastructure instance within a given time frame, then the infrastructure component is considered unavailable, assuming that reliable data transport is available from the monitored infrastructure back through the central monitoring point.
• There is a lack of correlation between monitored instances – if correlation exists at all, it is at a ‘depends on’ level rather than offering true correlation across disparate sources for holistic problem analysis.
• The dominant model of a centralized hub-spoke architecture with central consoles markedly contrasts with the distributed architecture of enterprise ICT deployments.

Event Zero’s approach to ICT infrastructure monitoring is based on the deployment of an event processing network, which offers a virtual infrastructure designed for large-scale distributed collection, real-time analysis, visualization, and response management.

Adapters are deployed to source data from monitored infrastructure, using either an agent-based or agentless approach. After infrastructure status information is determined, it is transmitted across the EPN using a QoS-aware approach that ensures monitoring event data of specific interest is prioritized (for example, outage information) . Subsequent processing evaluates incoming event data against a range of business rules, archives relevant instance data, and relays monitored event data feeds through to the visualization, response, and integration frameworks.

Event Zero’s next generation monitoring platform delivers not only baseline monitoring functionality, but extended capabilities which renders monitoring as a foundational enterprise technology:

• Out of the box support for over 60 industry standard protocols, covering OSI layers 2 through 7.
• Access to, and allowing for the extended monitoring of, a wide range of non-ICT infrastructures via industrial automation and control adapters.
• Comprehensive and dynamic state management across all monitored instances.
• Vertical and horizontal scaling to deliver resilient and flexible monitoring services.
• A single point of administration , configuration, and change management across the entire network.
• Graphical User Interfaces, including stock web dashboards and reports, and a build-on-demand framework allowing for the rapid development of custom user interfaces.
• Standards-based integration framework, providing to upstream applications (for example, in IT service management).
• Optional historical data retention and use in understanding current states and projecting future states.
• Fully distributed architecture including monitoring, rule-based processing, conditional notification, and response management.
• Off the shelf interface to service management infrastructure Infrastructure auto-discovery across a range of protocols and device types.

Together these features offer a new generation of ICT monitoring capability.

Event Zero’s next generation monitoring platform, underpinned by industry leading event processing technologies, offers compelling advantages to organizations seeking to monitor, analyze, and proactively manage ICT infrastructure to enable effective business operations.

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