Heroix explores new territory with Longitude

When it comes to deploying an enterprise-level systems management solution, one of the thorniest details is often maintenance of the ubiquitous data-collection agents. Depending on the size of the organization, maintaining the agent-related components of the enterprise software stack can become a real burden, especially when you factor in the need for revision testing -- to weed out bugs or incompatibilities with the agent processes.

Free IT resource TechNet: More ways to know it, share it, and keep it running. Sponsored by Microsoft Free IT resource Attend the SOA Executive Forum: Breaking SOA Bottlenecks SOAExecForum.com/may2007 Sponsored by InfoWorld Heroix Longitude 1.0 Heroix, heroix.com Good  7.6 criteria score weight Management 8 20% Monitoring 7 20% Reporting 7 20% Scalability 7 15% Setup 9 15% Value 8 10% Cost: $299 per instrumented system (base OS); $599 per system with application monitoring; $2,995 site license for J2EE support; subscription-based pricing also available Platforms: Windows XP, Windows 2000/2003 Server, Linux, Solaris Bottom Line: Heroix Longitude is an ambitious product that suffers from a lack of configurability. IT organizations that support primarily fixed location systems and are mostly interested in server application management should consider Longitude as an easy-to-deploy, “canned” management solution. However, shops that support mobile or similar occasionally connected clients or those that need the ability to manage custom applications should look elsewhere. About our Reviews and Scoring Methodology

Enter Longitude 1.0 from Heroix. A first of its kind, this systems management solution eliminates the agent portion of the equation altogether. In its place is a network of hublike statistics servers that use remote management protocols -- WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation), SNMP, rexec/SSH on Unix/Linux -- to collect metrics data over the network and aggregate it to a centralized data store (SAP repository).

Remote systems management is not a new idea. The basic protocols and infrastructure components have been in place for years. What makes Longitude different, however, is that it uses these facilities exclusively, as opposed to most traditional management solutions, which rely on a mixture of agents and remote sampling. This makes the product ridiculously easy to deploy: Just type in the name of the system or device you’re attempting to monitor on the Longitude Web console, and the product’s statistics server adds it to its list of sampling tasks.

Longitude supports a variety of remote authentication techniques and can collect data both from the host OS (Windows, Unix, Linux, and so on) and common app stacks (Apache, IIS, WebSphere, Oracle, and the like). These pre-configured rules profiles make setting up a basic monitoring infrastructure easy. They can also prove limiting, given that the list of supported applications is rather short and there’s no facility for defining your own custom profiles. Heroix promises to provide such a feature in the next version.

Even if your current platforms are supported, you’re still limited in how much you can customize the rules. For example, although you can tune individual threshold values -- to shape how data is analyzed and to determine when alerts should be logged -- you still can’t change the rules profile to include or exclude specific counters that might not be covered.

Another, deeper flaw involves the data-collection architecture. If Longitude’s greatest strength is its capability of collecting data without an agent, it’s also its biggest weakness. That’s because the collection process is entirely dependent on a persistent connection to the monitored entity. If network service is interrupted for any reason, Longitude can miss one of the scheduled sampling windows. And because the collection model is stateless -- each sample is a snapshot in time and unrelated to those that come before or after it -- there’s no way to recover those lost data points.

The ramifications for mission-critical environments -- where a missed event can mean the difference between detecting a potential failure mode in time to address it and sorting through the carnage postmortem -- are enormous. It also means that occasionally connected users -- mobile professionals and most home-office workers, for example -- are not viable candidates for instrumentation through Longitude.

I installed Longitude in a mixed Windows client and server environment. Initial deployment of the statistics server was a breeze, with the installation wizard handling most of the tasks, including setup of the SAP repository, automatically. My only complaint is that I was required to provide a common set of log-in credentials for accessing all monitored systems. Although this works great when you’re running in a Windows Active Directory domain environment, it’s not so hot for integrating systems from outside the chosen domain.

After I had the statistics server up and running, adding new monitored entities was as simple as typing in the system’s network name and choosing the desired monitoring rules profile. Longitude then connected to the system -- using the aforementioned domain credentials -- and sampled the metrics counters via WMI. Simple color-coded icons showed which systems were connected and which were inaccessible, and I could sort the list of systems by application, platform, and so on, with just a few mouse clicks.

Unfortunately, not everything in the Longitude Web UI was so obvious. I found that many common functions, such as viewing alert details, were buried beneath layers of hyperlinked HTML tables. Worse, some clickable regions of the UI were rendered without appropriate pointer indicators -- mouse pointer changing to indicate it was over a hyperlink, for example. I often found myself clicking randomly on various Web page elements in hopes of getting a hit. Better use of style sheets to handle cursor management and additional visual cues could make the Longitude UI far more intuitive.

On the positive side, I was generally impressed with level of detail that was provided, especially in the events console. Problem identification messages -- for example, low free memory or service not running -- were clearly worded and included relevant statistics data. Although I would have liked to have been able to track more/different app stacks, including custom programs, the threshold-tuning pages for the “canned” rules profiles were easy to follow and filled with copious explanatory text.

Pricing for Longitude is in line with comparable solutions from other vendors. Heroix also offers a subscription-based price schedule that includes full software maintenance for a significant discount versus its per-seat pricing.

Overall, Heroix Longitude is an ambitious product that suffers from an overly optimistic communications architecture and lack of configurability. This latter issue will be resolved if and when Heroix delivers on its promise of a profile creation/editing capability in its next release. This still won’t fix the problem of network dependency, however. Ironically, what Longitude needs is a traditional agent-based option so that it can support occasionally connected systems and ensure data collection in mission-critical environments.

Until then, the product offers rapid deployment and easy maintenance for environments with fixed system locations and highly reliable networks.