AggreGate Network Manager Monitors Multi-branch IT Infrastructure of Russia’s Largest Express Delivery Operator Pony Express

Comprehensive Monitoring of a Multi-branch Enterprise IT Infrastructure Pony Express was seeking for a solution to monitor state and performance of more than 70 business-critical Windows-based and FreeBSD-based servers acting as VPN, mail, database, web, DNS, collaboration and proxy servers. It was also crucial to track mission-critical enterprise applications and their database performance. Among other essential tasks was network equipment state and performance monitoring, including traffic control and tracking the bandwidth usage threshold crossing. It was also important to see the network traffic structure, i.e. applications and services occupying most network resources.

For meeting the project requirements, Pony Express IT management selected AggreGate Network Manager which, unlike its competitors, possessed all necessary tools for the existing IT infrastructure monitoring out-of-the-box.

The Network Manager tracks key performance metrics of servers, as well as core switches and routers by Hewlett Packard, 3COM and Cisco Systems. Application monitoring is enabled for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. One of the project objectives was applying standard profiles to monitor more than 10 Microsoft SQL Server 2000/2008 databases, including databases in a failover cluster mode used by lots of enterprise applications. Network traffic structure is easily discovered by collecting NetFlow v9 data and visualized by Network Manager.

AggreGate Network Manager made it possible to monitor the whole IT infrastructure from a single point. It helped to discover inefficiently used resources and bottlenecks reacting to potentially dangerous incidents before they appear. This prevented service downtime and minimized ticket count from the company staff. Ultimately, a synergistic effect was achieved – staff idle hours decreased while labor efficiency increased and the overall benefit from IT infrastructure utilization went up. View Case Study

Check a New Article About AggreGate Performance and Scalability

AggreGate Platform was designed with unlimited scalability in mind. While communication with a million devices definitely requires multiple servers to get joined into a distributed installation, but even a single AggreGate Server can demonstrate impressive performance figures. Read the full article here.

Monitor Your Virtual Infrastructure for Free!

AggreGate Network Manager enables out-of-the-box monitoring for your virtual infrastructure. It can monitor health, status and performance metrics of VMware vSphere/ESX/ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V, as well as individual guest VMs.

Out-of-the-box monitoringOut-of-the-box monitoring

Network Manager license for 10 devices is free. It means that you can monitor up to ten hypervisors simultaneously, but number of virtual machines monitored through them is unlimited. To activate a free license download AggreGate Network Manager and select Free license type during the installation. Let us know how it works for you! We will post interesting scenarios in our blog.

AggreGate Meets Big Data

Our devteam has finished integrating two new types of data storage into the Platform. These are:

  • NoSQL database Apache Cassandra
  • Key-Value database BerkleyDB Java Edition

Being used together instead of a relational database, new storages ensure extremely fast persistent configuration updates (20-50 K updates per second on a conventional server) and very high history/event storage rates (10-20 K samples per second, also on a typical low-cost server). Both databases support failover clustering for high availability and regular clustering for scalability.

OEM partners are welcome to contact us for a tech talk!

Network Topology Discovery Enhancements

New release of AggreGate Network Manager features improved L2 network discovery algorithm that relies on Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) and Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP). Those protocols enable accurate detection of switch-to-switch and switch-to-router connections, as well as connections between switches and other network devices. Topology visualization module has been also extended to support new tree and balloon layouts:

Try new Early Access Program release of Network Manager 5.2 by downloading a trial.

Better SVG Rendering Performance

We’ve dramatically improved performance of the Vector Drawing component used for SVG vector graphics visualization in widgets. Now a vector image has an Animated attribute. When the attribute is disabled (by default), the component is fully redrawn as soon as SVG parameters change, while built-in SVG animation is blocked. When it’s enabled, the component dynamically updates the image segments if SVG parameters change, whereas supports integrated SVG animation.

Animation attribute creates additional system load, thus enable this attribute only if you need build-in SVG animation or when your image is slow responding to SVG changes. Disabled animation increases widget loading speed with plenty of vector images, for example, pipeline HMIs. Contact us with any questions.