Articles tagged DevOps

The views expressed in this blog are strictly personal, and do not necessarily represent the views of Evident Software.

Evident ClearStone v5.0 – A new product for the NoSQL DB era

Date: February 28, 2011
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By Scott Barnett

We are about to release our newest version of ClearStone.

We have learned a lot over the past few years, serving customers in the Oracle Coherence and Data Synapse markets, as well as over the past 6 months as we turned our focus to NoSQL DBs – see our product section on NoSQL DB Logging and Reporting.  ClearStone 5.0 introduces the concept of Application Performance Management for NoSQL and MORE.  What do we mean by NoSQL and MORE?

First, we firmly believe that NoSQL (or whatever it is ultimately called) will be the next major tier of the application stack. As such, it will need all of the tools, from development and deployment to, yes, management. There are some basic monitoring capabilities available today for NoSQL DBs, but they are hardly enough.  They lack the detail, scope and actionable capabilities that most DevOps folks are used to.  At the same time, monitoring NoSQL by itself is not satisfactory – in order to get a holistic view of any web, cloud or enterprise application, developers and operations will need to see what’s going on at all levels of the application – from the system level to in-memory cache and everything in between.

So, ClearStone 5.0 was developed to move us even more firmly in the direction of holistic application management with a direct focus on NoSQL. It’s a release intended to address the reality that many applications using NoSQL are leveraging cloud assets and need a tool that can handle dynamic environments combining traditional Java stacks, NoSQL data caching, and virtual cloud environments.  Under the hood, we’ve replaced our internal caching mechanism in 4.x with a combination of Cassandra and a graph database that allow us to store more information, and provide better correlation/relationship mapping of assets between tiers in the application.   We kept (and continue to improve) our really slick user interface. We’re working to provide additional capabilities for people to get custom reports and specific views into their data.

The biggest change in 5.0 is the introduction of an API (we’re calling it the RESTful Data Interface) that lets you instrument metrics, KPIs, and SLAs for any IT asset using a scripting-friendly, XML-over-HTTP interface. We now support built-in collection of application-level metrics from platforms such as JBoss, WebLogic, and Tomcat and will introduce built-in collection of system-level metrics, such as UNIX SAR (system activity recorder). The new back end enables correlation of all collected metrics and events, including custom metrics/events, and real-time visibility into historical performance data without requiring a relational database.

We’ve been embracing the increasingly popular DevOps model, so that both developers and operations can take advantage of the platform. Specific new features for developers (especially during testing) include the ability to:

  • Define SLAs and conditions for alerting
  • Analyze performance, capacity, and utilization across multiple applications/systems
  • Tag resources into logical groups for easy reporting
  • View both real-time and historical performance data from a single interface

ClearStone 5.0 dramatically extends what we can manage, and provides much more flexibility and openness via the API. The architecture changes also allow us to become “cloud-friendly” and has prompted a dramatic pricing change where we will charge via a subscription based on the number of “resources” you are managing, not by server/core counts. By the way, the first 10 resources will be free! Beyond that, pricing will start at $10/resource/month, so you can start small and work your way up.  Now, not only the product is elastic, our pricing is too.  For those larger companies that only want to give us large sums of money, we still support ELA and all-you-can-eat prices for environments greater than 1,000 managed resources.

We will be beta testing 5.0 starting February 14, and plan to GA in mid-March. To sign up for the beta, go to http://www.evidentsoftware.com/clearstone-5-0-beta-program and fill out the form.  We’ll be taking the first 50 users in the beta program, and I hope you’ll be one of them!  I look forward to your feedback on our new software and our new direction!

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Cluster Application Monitoring (part deux)

Date: November 19, 2010
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By jclark

The folks over at RightScale wrote up a great post on Cluster Monitoring with some new visualizations they’ve been using. The visualizations were certainly interesting (especially to me) but there is a key message in the post. The big takeaway is the importance of having a consolidated time series view of multiple entities so the effect of an anomaly can easily be seen across an environment. In a clustered environment, individual entities are inevitably related and an entity in trouble can, over time, affect other entities. The RightScale folks clearly showed this in their use case. The difficulty becomes when the density of information becomes too great to discern a problem. Imagine 1000 servers represented in a heatmap with 600,000 data points. The amount of information needed to be shown could exceed the number of pixels you have available to show it! But an environment of that size would not likely be in the hands of a developer where detail is critical. Production environments can conceivably reach 100′s or 1000′s of entities and the monitoring needs change along with the change in roles between Developer and Operations (DevOps). Information critical to developers can become “noise” to Operations folks. The detailed information needs to be distilled down to exceptions that are leading to, or clearly indicate, a problem in the environment.

In Evident ClearStone, we bridge to gap between developers and operators by providing exception focused views backed by the detail used to evaluate the exception condition. Furthermore, there is value in showing dissimilar but related entities like the constituent components of a NoSQL or Data Caching Platform (DCP) fabric to see cause and effect of related cascading failures. Below is a summarized view of various Oracle Coherence components showing health indicators for every 30 seconds of the last 15 mins. The color of the health indicator represent severity healthy condition.

Using the exception focused view above, specific details of a particular entity or entities to attempt to determine a root cause.

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Metrics and Dashboards…. and DevOps

Date: August 3, 2010
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By Scott Barnett

Our friends at Shopzilla talked about their application environment recently, and particularly around how they measure and visualize metrics from a wide variety of sources. This goes under the general category of DevOps – bringing development and operations closer together, and giving operations engineers the highly configurable, agile tools that developers have been enjoying for some time. To realize the vision of DevOps, an organization must be able to collect metrics and events from a variety of sources, bring that data together in an intelligent way (correlate it), and then present it in the best possible way for each of the various audiences in the organization. And all these steps must occur in near real time–in other words, the application environment must be able to analyze a vast amount of data fast enough for developers, operations staff, and business stake-holders to take whatever action might be necessary to optimize IT operations. No small feat – Juan Paul talked about half a dozen tools they use (including ClearStone) to manage this task.

So, we’ve been thinking here at Evident about an ambitious task – what if ClearStone could manage more of the DevOps problem? It’s clear that we are already in use within the development and operations community when it comes to managing and monitoring Oracle Coherence – but that’s just the first step. What about managing the application tier, other data caching/NoSQL environments, perhaps even database and system level metrics? That is the direction that Evident is moving in – witness our expansion in DCP to support memcached, and others are coming soon. Also, AppServer containers such as WebLogic, jBoss, Tomcat – out of the box capabilites to manage, monitor and instrument these containers in conjunction with the DCP layer. Also, grid technologies such as Hadoop, GridGain, DataSynapse.

Do you have custom code or your own containers? No problem, how about we give you a toolkit to bring those in yourself? And management plug-ins so that operations can leverage their existing tools for managing their environment and providing more automated alerting and control to the production environment.

Ambitious it is, but the feedback we’re getting and progress we’re making has been very encouraging. And we hear more people doing what Juan Paul and Shopzilla are doing, so we’re pleased with that path.

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