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The application is slow.” That’s an end-user complaint for the ages. So why don’t more tools exist that can help? Perhaps it’s because even the best SNMP tools do little more than monitor and report. What’s really needed is intelligence -- an automated analysis of what’s going
on inside and among network servers, routers and switches, and
across their interfaces and applications.
One company making strides in this direction is AccelOps, a three-year-old Silicon Valley startup founded by former Cisco Systems engineers. AccelOps’ flagship product, and namesake, is designed to gather and interpret data from device and server logs, track configuration changes and display the differences, visualize device and application dependencies to simplify problem diagnosis, and reduce downtime.
AccelOps became generally available in June 2009 and competes with solutions from ManageEngine, Nimsoft (which is soon to be acquired by CA Technologies), and SolarWinds. AccelOps unveiled a channel program this month that permits solution providers to package the AccelOps service as their own.
AccelOps is aimed at small and midsize businesses with 500 to 5,000 users, a market that, according to Scott Gordon, vice president of marketing and business development at AccelOps, lacks a complete solution.
“Most of their process is around configuration management and help desk. Everything else is piecemeal. So system integrators and VARs have an opportunity to offer managed services,” said Gordon.
At the solution provider’s discretion, AccelOps typically sells for around $2,000 per month, of which the solution provider gets a cut, said Gordon. The multitenant Software-as-a-Service Modern Network for today’s businesses, it’s all about intelligence edition requires an on-site dual-core server running VMware’s ESX or ESXi. Client-side software performs local discovery and collects data, which it compresses, encrypts and sends to the AccelOps back end for processing and storage. An Internet connection is required.
Costs, which are the same for the SaaS and VM versions, are based on the number of configuration items, which include operating systems, applications and anything with an IP address, as well as the number of events per second (EPS) they generate. In contrast, competitor SolarWinds charges by the process which, according to Gordon, ends up being more costly.
“Every time you launch an application and it kicks off a series of processes, there’s a charge. With AccelOps, we only charge the first time we see the application. After that, it only counts as one [configuration item].” Also unlike competitive solutions, AccelOps clearly displays the number of configuration items being counted. “And we let you pick and choose what [configuration items] to keep. And when you relicense, we pro-rate the difference.”
When deployed as an appliance, AccelOps requires a four-core server with 8 GB of memory and 300 GB of available hard disk space. When two AccelOps licenses are available, performance is improved automatically.
“When you buy two licenses, they see each other and automatically load-balance,” Gordon said. Competitive solutions, he added, require such capability to be configured manually.
Modules in the extensible AccelOps solution include network behavior analysis; a configuration management database with Layer 2/3 topology mapping; agentless discovery; resource and process analysis on all connected systems; extensible Boolean, nested and statistical profiling and roles-based access control. Data is encrypted.
The CRN Test Center was unable to install and configure the self-hosted edition of AccelOps in time for this review. Instead, reviewers were given access to an AccelOps site and worked with the software remotely, accessing it from a variety of browsers on Mac OS X and Windows. All worked flawlessly. What we also found was an extremely powerful, stable and comprehensive monitoring and management tool that would benefit nearly any organization, particularly those with numerous network assets that are varied and widely dispersed.
We’ve only got space here to describe a few of the most useful capabilities. The first is for that “the application is slow” problem. Most topology maps do a fine job of finding and displaying devices. Heck, even Windows can do that. AccelOps stands out for the way it displays the devices involved in a particular service, along with their status. Select the dashboard for a service and all devices involved in that service are connected by red lines (see screen shot) along with the number of device warnings, if any (also red). Drilling into a device displays details about recent incidents, device health, and stats on relevant interfaces, services and apps.
Providing higher-level views are summary dashboards for apps, availability, performance, incidents, security, devices and business services. Selecting a service from the latter, for example, displays lists of monitored devices and apps in the service along with statistics on uptime, performance memory and processor utilization, as well as a variety of other system data. Red items stand out as critical alerts, yellow items signify warnings and green items signify go.
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