Benefits are substantial for Hyperic users. As mentioned in a post earlier this year, they include:

• Single place to get help and collaborate on issues involving systems management, software development and virtualization.
• With over 1.2 million community members, including VMware product, support and field teams, this is the largest technology community leading the market on bringing the enterprise to the cloud.
• The largest resource knowledge base for VMware products, users can find sample code, SDKs, and APIs to help with all their development needs.

The new Hyperic VMware Community retains all of the former forum category organization, as well as the complete history of all announcements, messages and threads. Each thread from the former Forums will now be redirected to the new VMware Communities to aid in search or if users have bookmarked popular topics.

User history has been attached based on email address. If a user’s email address did not exist in the VMware Community, a new account was created for them and the user was notified to register now. All reward points have been transferred and users now gain credit under the VMware Communities rewards program.

Got questions? For questions on the migration, please check out the Hyperic VMware Communities Migration FAQ or, for general questions on how the VMware Communities work, see the VMware Communities FAQ.

Haven’t used the VMware Communities yet? All Hyperic users, including open source and enterprise users, are welcome to join. To join, go to the VMware Communities login and click Register.

On February 1^st, we will migrate the independent Hyperic Forums over to the overall VMware Communities.  All forums, messages, threads, announcements and reward points will be migrated over to a new Hyperic VMware Community. User history will be attached based on email address. If no user is found in the VMware Community, a new user will be created and an email will be sent to the user inviting them to join.

Once complete, this will offer Hyperic users a multitude of benefits including:

• Single place to get help and collaborate on issues involving systems management, software development and virtualization.
• With over 1.2 million community members, including VMware product, support and field teams, this is the largest technology community leading the market on bringing the enterprise to the cloud.
• The largest resource knowledge base for VMware products, users can find sample code, SDKs, and APIs to help with all their development needs.

The Hyperic Forums will be in read-only mode from February 1, 2012 for a few days, after which all content and discussions will be redirected and available on the VMware Communities. For more information on this migration, please see the Hyperic VMware Communities Migration FAQ.

Haven’t used the VMware Communities yet? All Hyperic users, including open source and enterprise users, are welcome to join. To join, go to the VMware Communities login and click Register.

• Login to Hyperic Forums
• Login to VMware Communities

These are two important milestones that completes the transition from our roots as an independent open source company and product into the dynamic and diverse world of true enterprise software lead by VMware. As former Hyperic CEO Javier Soltero pointed out in his original blog post on the acquisition:

“I’ve long argued that Hyperic’s vision of management software is aimed at helping people manage a newer, more complex, and more dynamic data center environment. For the last five years we have delivered that vision, including being one of the few management software products providing end‑to‑end support for virtualized application environments from the hardware to the virtualized service component. By joining forces with VMware, Hyperic will continue to fulfill this vision in lockstep with VMware’s ambitions to simplify IT and reduce operational expenses.”

It has been a busy two years, with tremendous results. With the announcement of VMware vFabric Application Performance Manager, Hyperic has been integrated as a cornerstone into VMware’s new cloud management strategy to help application owners living in the world of Infrastructure-as-a-Service to effectively manage their own SLAs. Easy-to-use and cloud-savvy, this new application performance management solution wraps in Hyperic to help accelerate and automate how application architects, developers and administrators manage applications across all layers of software and infrastructure.

Additionally, we are excited to announce that our customers experience will make the final transition to be part of the overall VMware Community. By early 2012, we will migrate the independent Hyperic Forums over to the overall VMware Communities.  Once complete, this will offer Hyperic users a single place to get all your questions answered about application management, software development and virtualization. With over 1.2 million community members, Hyperic users will have better access to meet online with peers to collaborate and solve problems, find sample code, SDKs, and APIs to help with all their development needs.

Special note for existing Hyperic Forums users:

While the migration is taking place, the Hyperic Forums will be in read-only mode for a few days, after which all content and discussions will be available on the VMware Communities. All existing Hyperic Forums users are encouraged to login and ensure that their email addresses are correct for this migration to take place. After the migration, your registered email will be notified of how to login to your new account. For more information on this migration, please see the Hyperic VMware Communities Migration FAQ .

Updated: Our IT maintenance window to perform this migration has shifted from early December 2011 to early 2012.

Cloud Foundry is the revolutionary open platform as a service from VMware that supports multiple frameworks, application services, and clouds. The vFabric Hyperic team is pleased to announce the availability of the free Cloud Foundry plugin for Hyperic that brings Hyperic’s proven ability to monitor, alert, and control application infrastructure resources to Cloud Foundry’s applications and services.

Overview and Features

Cloud Foundry’s VMC command line interface allows you to deploy and manage your applications running on CloudFoundry.com, but serious users require the automation and continuous monitoring capabilities from full-fledged management tools. Therefore, we have developed the Cloud Foundry plugin for Hyperic that utilizes the same APIs that VMC uses to talk to the Cloud Controller, and brings all of the information and capabilities into a dashboard GUI view while tracking metric data and events for historical purposes. The Hyperic plugin communicates with CloudFoundry.com remotely, so it’s easy to deploy into any existing Hyperic instances running in your data center. Some of the features include:

• Start an application
• Stop an application
• Restart an application
• Update reserved memory for an application
• Update the number of instances for an application
• Scale up an application by 1 instance
• Scale down an application by 1 instance

Benefits

Using Hyperic in conjunction with Cloud Foundry account gives you a lot of benefits and control. Here are just some of the benefits that you’ll get when using them together.

• Create alerts to notify or fix application runtime issues
• Visual dashboard view of health and configuration of all applications in Cloud Foundry whether or not they are running
• Review application deployment, availability, and resource consumption history
• On-demand, scheduled, or automated control actions to start, stop, restart, re-configure, or scale Cloud Foundry applications
• Track events when applications crash or change state
• Compare resource utilization against user quota
• …and many more

In addition, you can combine these metrics with other existing Hyperic services, such as HTTP or ping checks, to get an even more comprehensive view of what is happening with your running applications, including response time and availability (from the client perspective).

Installation and Configuration

The Cloud Foundry plugin for Hyperic is now available on HyperForge. Follow the Configuration Instructions section to download and install and configure the plugin on both Hyperic server and agent, and you’ll be monitoring your Cloud Foundry account in minutes.

Note that because the Cloud Foundry server is created manually, the Hyperic agent will not gather the user account properties very quickly after provisioning since it wasn’t auto-discovered. To expedite the properties discovery process, you may choose to restart the agent to kickstart the data gathering. You can start the agent remotely by navigating to the agent resource in the Hyperic UI, click on Views tab and then Agent Commands. Here you can select ‘restart’ to restart the Hyperic agent and have it report your Cloud Foundry user account info immediately.

Additional Information

Here are some additional source of information regarding this plugin:

• A screencast demonstrating how to create the Cloud Foundry resource, create alerts, and perform control actions
• If you are not yet a Cloud Foundry user, go sign up for an account on the current beta service at CloudFoundry.com
• If you are not familiar with Hyperic and would like to find out more, please go to vFabric Hyperic
• Hyperic HQ is the open source Hyperic and is fully compatible with the Cloud Foundry plugin, find out more about it at the Hyperic Community

Known for their hosting Zimbra and providing Hyperic monitoring for all their customers, managed hosting provider Contegix has tested the new appliance and has this to say of it:

“Contegix is committed to providing our customers with the best hosting services possible. The combination of Hyperic and Zimbra® Appliance increases our visibility into how customers are using email and collaboration. It enables us to increase our productivity and efficiency in managing this critical part of this infrastructure, while simultaneously helping our customers make smarter business decisions.” — Matthew Porter, CEO and co-founder of Contegix.

Key Benefits

• Flexible Alerting – Hyperic can alert Zimbra administrators within a minute of when the Zimbra application or any of its infrastructure starts to have a performance degradation, indicating a problem is about to occur. Hyperic alerts allows alert recipients to vary based on problem type, time of day and escalation workflows. They can also initiate control actions to self-heal established problems without administrators needing to intervene.
• Automated Control Actions – Hyperic control actions can automatically implement problem fixes, such as restarting a mail server.  When used for established problems or regular maintenance, this can reduce the number of off-hours issues that demand Zimbra administrator attention.
• Advanced Diagnostics – Zimbra administrators now have access to historical trending, log files, and a deep variety of performance indicators so they can have the insight into everything they need to know to quickly pinpoint the root cause of service problems, enabling them to restore service levels with a minimum impact on business productivity.

Pricing and Availability

Zimbra Appliance is currently available starting at USD $625 per 25 mailboxes for a perpetual license. Hyperic agents are now included on all Zimbra Appliances. For more information, visit:  www.vmware.com/products/zimbra

Hyperic is currently available in two editions: Hyperic HQ, the free, open source edition; and vFabric Hyperic, the commercial edition starting at $300 per Zimbra server per year.  For more information, visit http://www.vmware.com/products/springsource-hyperic/

For more information on this announcement, please see the ‘VMware Simplifies Monitoring of Zimbra Appliance with vFabric Hyperic’ press release here: http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/zimbra-hyperic.html

Thanks to all the users, community members and the entire Zimbra team for helping us to deliver this integrated appliance!

Building on previous releases for the Hyperic 4 family, this release is focused on updating the underlying infrastructure to a modern, lightweight, and modular architecture.  Taking advantage of the deep capabilities of both the Spring java application framework and Apache Tomcat servlet container, the Hyperic development team has improved performance and streamlined development time for future features and provided faster turnaround for bug fixes.

Switch from EJB to Spring 3.0

Originally developed using EJBs, this new Hyperic release upgrades the codebase to the Spring 3.0 Framework. Having direct access to many of the core Spring developers through SpringSource, a division of VMware, and the parent company of Hyperic, the development team recognized that the move to Spring 3.0 Framework would allow them to develop code that is more portable, reusable, testable and maintainable, ultimately providing Hyperic engineers and users with a simpler configuration, improved debugging and boosting overall quality.

As described by Hyperic co-founder and senior product manager, Charles Lee:

“We know from SpringSource surveys that 60% of Spring developers cite faster project completion and application quality as top reasons for using Spring. Our migration supports these assertions. By leveraging the Spring framework we have reduced Hyperic’s codebase by over 7% and dramatically decreased code complexity, which allows for faster startup times and more efficient development. “

In addition to migrating to Spring 3.0, the development team was able to modularize the code base and add Java 5 constructs.

Switch from JBoss to Apache Tomcat

For Hyperic, switching from JBoss to Apache Tomcat, went well beyond just another opportunity to continue to eat their own dog food. Although parent company SpringSource has a significant investment in the Apache Tomcat project, through their own commercial distribution of the software, vFabric tc Server, as well as the number of committers to the open source Apache Tomcat project employed by the company, Hyperic engineers were motivated to make the switch because of a move toward lean software development. Known as a lean and powerful web application server, over 70% of enterprise data centers rely Apache Tomcat for their application server because it is simpler to configure, easier to debug, and lowers code complexity which translates into faster development times—the goal for lean software development.

The Hyperic team first saw significant development time savings on server startup and shutdown. In a case study presented at the SpringOne G2X conference in October, Jennifer Hickey, Hyperic technical lead for the migration, described a clear example of development efficiencies achieved:

“We saw a significant improvement in developer productivity on the Hyperic product after the migration. For example a single developer coding and debugging an application saved 5 minutes of waiting to start up or shut down the application. Considering that developer may restart the application 12 times a day, that saves the developer one hour a day, which is a significant gain in development time.”

Move to Git and Apache Maven

Additional development processes were also updated.  The code repository was moved from subversion to git, and the build process moved from ant to Apache Maven. This lets Hyperic contributors take advantage of git’s distributed architecture, fast performance, and merge/branch capabilities. To download the source from the git code repository go to http://git.springsource.org/hq. Additionally, all of the Hyperic modules needed for development of custom plugins or features can now be downloaded from our maven repository at http://maven.hyperic.org/release.

Support for GemFire, RabbitMQ, and tc Server

The new release adds out-of-the-box support for three of the VMware vFabric platform services, including vFabric GemFire 6.5 distributed caching system, RabbitMQ enterprise messaging system, and the vFabric tc Server Java runtime server version 2.1 that was also released this week. Support for vFabric tc Server existed for previous releases of Hyperic; however, in 4.5 the plugin is now bundled in with all Hyperic distributions, and is no longer a separate download.

To find out more about the updates found in the open source Hyperic HQ 4.5 and the enterprise version vFabric Hyperic 4.5, please see the release notes.

Thanks again to all of our community members and customers that contributed feature ideas and bug reports to this release!

We’d like to thank Infoworld for selecting us, our users and customers for their support, our developer community for their contributions, and the hard-working Hyperic engineering, quality assurance, and customer support teams. We couldn’t have done this without you!

We have some more news coming down the track soon, so keep your eyes on this blog as well as to our Twitter stream.

As our CEO Paul Maritz mentioned at yesterday’s VMworld keynote, our industry has hit a tipping point where virtualization has surpassed the physical computing paradigm, due to a need for IT to quickly respond to dynamic business needs at ever-improving price points. To ensure even greater agility and value, the next destination for our industry is cloud computing. Making this shift requires a pragmatic, evolutionary approach that leverages investments in existing architecture.

Yesterday, Rod Johnson, SVP of VMware’s Cloud Application Platform Division, described how VMware vFabric is a key element of enabling our customers to reach this next destination of cloud computing. Delivering the agility and value promised by cloud computing requires a new kind of application — cloud applications — that have their own unique characteristics:

• Dynamic architectures
• Elastic capacity
• Extreme scalability
• Open choice

How do cloud applications change performance monitoring?

These characteristics of cloud applications bring new requirements to application performance monitoring. For instance, dynamic architectures and elastic capacity imply a datacenter defined by constant flux, with pools of hundreds, even thousands of VMs continually being started and stopped, vMotioned, reverted to snapshots, and so on.

This blistering rate of change is a natural outgrowth of responsiveness to business needs. But it is impossible to manage with manually maintained, complex configuration files used by legacy monitoring tools. The only way to get ahead of it is to use a monitoring product that can automatically discover changes to your entire application infrastructure — everything from the application code itself to the vSphere host. Hyperic Autodiscovery does exactly that, updating itself within moments of app infrastructure changes.

The extreme scalability required by cloud applications requires a lot of virtual machines – which leads to a firehose of performance data. For instance, a typical Hyperic customer will collect a million performance metrics per minute. It’s not at all hard to get to this volume of metrics, since we have a number of customers running 1000 (or more!) virtual machines, each with a Hyperic agent collecting about 1000 metrics. So, even though we’re not talking about Google-level scalability, application performance data become a performance problem in itself if not managed properly. Thankfully, Hyperic is engineered to handle high volumes of application performance data.

Open choice means that cloud applications can be built from a wide range of components. For instance, as Rod pointed out yesterday, cloud applications might use WebSphere, WebLogic, JBoss, and our own vFabric tc Server, as well as public cloud platforms, for their Java application server tier. It’s critical to have a monitoring tool that supports a range of popular web application technologies out of the box. But no one tool can support every conceivable technology. It’s understandable – there’s no way one vendor, no matter how innovative, can keep up with the thousands of other innovative companies in our industry. So in addition, it’s critical to have a monitoring tool that makes it easy to build custom monitoring plug-ins, and makes its built-in plugins open source to provide a wide range of code to reference and leverage. Hyperic delivers on this front, providing approximately 50,000 performance metrics for 75 web application technologies, as well as open source plugin code and a fully-supported plugin API that has been used by third parties to extend the range of technologies monitored by Hyperic.

What’s next for Hyperic?

We’re demonstrating vFabric Hyperic live at VMworld, in the main VMware booth. Come see for yourself how Hyperic adjusts to changes in virtual infrastructure in near real-time. Later this month, we’ll demonstrate Hyperic at Oracle Open World in San Francisco, September 19-23, and after that, we’ll be at Spring One 2GX in Chicago, October 19-22.

We’re committed to making Hyperic the leading choice for monitoring cloud applications, with their inherent dynamicism, scale, and openness, and we’re looking forward to working with you — our open source community, our users, and our customers — to make this happen.

What problems does Hyperic 4.4 solve?

The genesis of this release was that, as we listened to our customers and community, we were struck by two things. First, more and more of them are deploying their custom applications across virtual infrastructures. Second, virtualized app infrastructure is a game-changer that increases datacenter change by an order of magnitude. For instance, to scale app infrastructure up and down to accommodate rising and falling end-user demand, server VMs are continually spun up and powered down. Legacy monitoring tools that were not virtualization-aware could not keep up, and the operations teams that used them were left with serious infrastructure visibility gaps. It became clear that operations teams needed to equip themselves to prepare for a massive new level of datacenter dynamicism.

Hyperic 4.4 addresses this problem through the following new capabilities in Hyperic Enterprise:

Rapid Diagnosis of Virtualized Application Performance Problems: IT operations teams can now use Hyperic to rapidly pinpoint the cause of performance issues of applications running on virtualized infrastructure, by providing them with visibility into all application infrastructure layers, enabling them to determine whether the root cause of issues lies within an application, its guest operating system, or its ESX host. System administrators can easily compare performance data between an application and its corresponding virtual machine and ESX host via a new Hyperic user interface. This UI enables system administrators to reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) and increase mean time between failures (MTBF).

Automatic Maintenance of Application Infrastructure Inventory: Hyperic 4.4 automatically discovers ESX hosts, virtual machines, and guest operating systems within minutes of their launch, and presents them in a unified topology so users can see which application components are running on which ESX hosts. This eliminates reliance on chronically out-of-date configuration management databases (CMDBs). Additionally, Hyperic detects when virtual machines are moved from one ESX host to another using vMotion™, and adjusts topologies accordingly: no monitoring data is lost and there’s no need to recreate alerting workflows. This exceptional level of automation saves system administrators time and lets them manage more applications and servers than ever before.

Virtualization-Aware Alerting: Hyperic 4.4 can distinguish between when a guest operating system has shut down unintentionally, and when it has been intentionally powered down or suspended. This prevents false alarms and enables system administrators to elastically scale their application infrastructure without triggering alert storms.

Building on experience

Of course, Hyperic is no stranger to virtualized application infrastructure monitoring. In 2006, we delivered the industry’s first application performance monitoring for VMware ESX and GSX, and has long provided system administrators with the following capabilities, which remain in version 4.4:

Application Virtualization Migration Assurance: For IT teams running pilot projects to virtualize custom application workloads, Hyperic enables users to definitively quantify virtualization’s impact on application performance by baselining critical performance metrics for both physical and virtual infrastructure.

Automated Problem Resolution: Hyperic can automate common responses to application problems — such as reverting a virtual machine to a snapshot, restarting a virtual machine, and rebooting a guest operating system. These automated recovery actions help fulfill virtualization’s promise of greater operational efficiency, especially for companies with global customers who need to keep consumer-facing applications running 24/7.

Virtualized Environment Event & Log Monitoring: Hyperic’s event management features provide visibility into the log events reported for every virtual machine. Log events provide system awareness for performance data, configuration changes, and security action changes, such as when a virtual machine has been reverted to a snapshot. These events can be used to generate alerts, or simply to correlate errors reported in the VMware logs with performance and health indicators elsewhere in the environment.

Version 4.4 is Hyperic’s first major release as part of VMware. We’ve enjoyed the experience of working side-by-side with our new colleagues on the VMware vSphere team, leveraging their virtualization know-how and incredible development and testing infrastructure. We’re looking forward to continued collaboration to further deepen Hyperic’s virtualization capabilities.

Where to go from here

Check out our Hyperic 4.4 demo, download Hyperic Enterprise 4.4 or Hyperic Open Source 4.4, and dive into the new documentation on monitoring vSphere.

To be clear, the new vCenter integration is only in Hyperic Enterprise 4.4. That said, we’ve updated Hyperic Open Source 4.4 with a new version of the HQApi, and encourage you to check it out.

Please register for our upcoming Hyperic 4.4 webinar that explains the 10 pitfalls to avoid when monitoring a virtualized environment –  and how to avoid them, on Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 9 am Pacific / noon Eastern (other time zones).

Finally, we welcome your feedback. Let us know what you think in the comments below, Hyperic Forums (http://forums.hyperic.com/), or Twitter (we’re @hyperic).

These articles describe how virtualized environments are much more dynamic from legacy physical server farms, in that they enable new server instances to rapidly spun up and shut down, as well moved across physical hosts, in order to respond to surges in demand while maintaining high levels of availability and performance — and what that means for the sysadmins that need to keep everything running.

As for SpringSource Hyperic, we have some exciting news coming — so watch this space!

Hyperic Open Source 4.3 features include:

• SNMP version 3 — improved support for SNMP v3 authentication, plus SNMP v3 privacy services support.
• Extended Windows Event Logging — supports richer event logging for Win32

resources, so you can define more precise alert conditions to reduce alert volume.

• IBM WebSphere App Server – added WAS 7.0 support, removed WAS 5.0 support
• Oracle WebLogic Server – uses two-way SSL to communicate with WLS Administration Server
• IBM DB2 — now uses JDBC for management/monitoring, rather than DB2 API
• Zimbra – added support for Zimbra 4.5 through 6.0
• Hyperic API 3.1 with new functionality for managing control actions, logged events, alerts, SNMP, resources, groups, and Hyperic Server configurations.
• Over 140 bug fixes specific to Open Source Edition

Hyperic Enterprise 4.3 features include everything in the Open Source edition, plus:

• Improved Permissions Management, with simplified role definitions and new alert-related permissions.
• Enhanced support for SNMP version 3 — support for SNMP v3 View Access Control Model (VACM) and multiple variable bindings in SNMP notification escalation steps.
• Over 35 bug fixes specific to Enterprise Edition

Here is the Hyperic 4.3 download page. Enjoy!

Many thanks to all the users, customers, and engineers that contributed to this release.

You can get your paws on the bits here.

As always, a big thanks to the developers, quality assurance engineers, customers, and users that made this release possible.

You can get 4.1.2 here. Have at it!

Thanks to all the users, customers, and engineers that contributed to this release.

You can get 4.1.1 here. Enjoy!

And as always, thanks to the many users, customers, and engineers that contributed to this release.

Thank you to our community members who spent many hours hammering the 4.1 beta release over the past few weeks and got us to this point of a solid GA release. Notable changes and additions include:

HQ Web Services API Updates – The web services API will include a set of command line tools for performing administration and configuration tasks. You will be able to use command line tools to access and update information about inventory, metric templates, alerts, escalations, users, and roles.

MySQL Product Plugin Updates – The MySQL plugin has been optimized to use a minimal amount of queries to capture all performance stats, thereby reducing the impact monitoring could have on overall performance. Replication monitoring has also been added.

Audit Logger – Events around changes to alerts will now be written to the database with an indication of the user that performed the action. Auditing will also optionally be configured to write to a log file.

Support for Private Groups – Users that are authorized to create groups may designate a group to be “private”.  Private groups are invisible to other users, including admin users.  You will be able to share a private group by associating it with a role.

Additional Alert Acknowledge and Fix Options – New options on the Alert Center page will allow you to acknowledge and fix selected alerts, and to annotate acknowledgments.  A new option in the Recent Alerts portlet will allow you to acknowledge Alerts as well as fix them.

Search Returns Usernames – The Search button in upper right corner of each page in user interface now returns users, as well as resources.

SUPPORT IMPROVEMENTS

New HQ Health Database Queries – The Database tab on the HQ Health page will have new queries, one that returns a count of stalled escalations, and two that show database locks and activity.  The new queries are troubleshooting aids for Hyperic support.

HQ Health Database Actions – Actions will be available on the Database tab of the HQ Health page. A purge auto-inventory queue action will allow you to delete the contents of the queue, in the event that you are having trouble importing resources. Another new action will allow you to purge stalled escalations that were detected with the stalled escalation query.

> Download HQ Enterprise
> Download HQ Open Source

Remember, if you’ve got something you’d like to see in our next systems monitoring product release, please post a comment below!

We value your input and appreciate any comments, bugs or problems you may find. Not only does this make HQ 4.1 a more stable release but it also enscribes your name into Hyperic history as a contributor!

Current build number is 1009 and can be found on Sourceforge. The release notes and detailed feature descriptions can be found on the Hyperic website and any bugs or problems you find should be posted in our Bugs Forum.

On top of that, we have decided to embark down a new path which will be beneficial to everyone, especially our customers. This new path means we will be doing quarterly releases to Hyperic HQ. It’s very exciting news internally for our engineering team because now they can crank out new features four times a year!

Below you will find the full list of expected features and improvements coming out sometime in mid-March. These features are all queued up to make this dot release but we of course reserve the right to add/remove as neccessary.

FEATURE UPDATES

HQ Web Services API Updates – The web services API will include a set of command line tools for performing administration and configuration tasks. You will be able to use command line tools to access and update information about inventory, metric templates, alerts, escalations, users, and roles.

MySQL Product Plugin Updates – The MySQL plugin has been optimized to use a minimal amount of queries to capture all performance stats, thereby reducing the impact monitoring could have on overall performance. Replication monitoring has also been added.

NEW FEATURES

Audit Logger – Events around changes to alerts will now be written to the database with an indication of the user that performed the action. Auditing will also optionally be configured to write to a log file.

Support for Private Groups – Users that are authorized to create groups may designate a group to be “private”.  Private groups are invisible to other users, including admin users.  You will be able to share a private group by associating it with a role.

Additional “Add to Group” Options – You will be able to add a resource to an existing, as well as a new, group on the Browse Resource page.

Additional Delete Option – The Tools menu for any resource will allow you to delete the resource, or add it to a new group.

Additional Alert Acknowledge and Fix Options – New options on the Alert Center page will allow you to acknowledge and fix selected alerts, and to annotate acknowledgments.  A new option in the Recent Alerts portlet will allow you to acknowledge Alerts as well as fix them.

Search Returns Usernames – The Search button in upper right corner of each page in user interface now returns users, as well as resources.

INFRASTRUCTURE CHANGES

HQ Support for Oracle 11g – The HQ database will be able to run on Oracle 11G. Support for Oracle 9i will be deprecated.

JBoss Server Upgrade – HQ Server will be deployed using JBoss 4.2.3. This will be an upgrade from JBoss 4.0.3 SP1 used in previous HQ releases.

Asynchronous Resource Deletion – When you click the Delete button on the Browse Resource tab, selected resources will be deleted from the database asynchronously.  Although the resources will immediately disappear from the resource listing in the HQ user interface, there may be a short delay before resources are deleted from the database.

SUPPORT IMPROVEMENTS

New HQ Health Database Queries – The Database tab on the HQ Health page will have new queries, one that returns a count of stalled escalations, and two that show database locks and activity.  The new queries are troubleshooting aids for Hyperic support.

HQ Health Database Actions – Actions will be available on the Database tab of the HQ Health page. A purge auto-inventory queue action will allow you to delete the contents of the queue, in the event that you are having trouble importing resources. Another new action will allow you to purge stalled escalations that were detected with the stalled escalation query.

License Expiration Email – HQ Enterprise will issue email notifications that your HQ license expiration is near.  Email notifications commence 45 days prior to license expiration.

Well, there you have it folks. The tenative list of features, changes, and improvements due out in mid-March. We are always listening to our customers and potential customers regarding new system management features so if you’ve got something you’d like to see in our next release, please post a comment below.

The challenge: share something truly unique and extraordinary with us in the comments or by email (marty at hyperic dot com) and we’ll make it worth your while in the form of Hyperic swag and maybe even Internet fame (assuming you want Internet fame).

So, dear readers and HQ users, what say you?

To find out what goodies await you in 4.0.3, please checkout the Release Notes.

Thanks again to all that contributed feature ideas and bug reports to this release!

Hyperic IQ allows you to report on any metrics, any resources, in any data center with support of a variety of chart types, including gauges, multi-metric line charts, bar graphs, and stacked charts. You can also create reports in the format that makes the data most useable, whether PDF, Excel, Rich Text Format, comma-separated values, or Flash. Not only that but with Hyperic IQ, you can also expose and deliver reports with ease to anyone within your organization. That’s the power of Hyperic IQ.

I can rant and rave all day about our new reporting suite but it’s probably best if you read more about it for yourself! For more information, check out our IQ reporting launch page, IQ products page, or download the IQ datasheet (.pdf).

If you have any comments or feedback from our announcement today, I’d love to hear from you below.

To find out what holiday surprises you might find in 4.0.2, please checkout the Release Notes.

Thanks again to all that contributed feature ideas and bug reports to this release!

Now past its 5th year of production usage, it’s incredibly cool for me to see how this product has evolved from what we conceived back in 2002. With the help of hundreds of customers and thousands of users, we’ve been able to stay focused on two key themes that drive everything we build into our product:

1- the desire to build products that help people manage large scale web environments
2- the desire to build products that do not create new problems while attempting to solve old ones

HQ 4.0 represents a big step forward for both of those themes. HQ 4.0 provides unique levels of visibility into every aspect of web applications and then uses that visibility to offer insight into diagnosing complex issues from virtualization layers all the way up the stack, forecast capacity requirements, and helping operations teams get reliable, detailed notification of problems before they create a crisis. HQ 4.0 also delivers these benefits alongside a whole new set of automation capabilities including extended, open API’s, UI automation workflows, and automatic agent upgrading. In a time when the demands of data center operations teams increase while resources are scarce, we want to make sure our technology helps people manage more with less.

4.0 also represents Hyperic’s continued commitment to innovation in the management space. 4.0 introduces the worlds first web application management solution designed and packaged natively for the Amazon AWS cloud. HQ for AWS is packaged as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) which leverages technology like Elastic Block Storage to provide a fully cloud-enabled solution that can be deployed as easily as any other EC2 AMI out there. It also provides the first cloud-friendly management agent which allows users to manage cloud based virtual machines securely and reliably from either inside the cloud, or from HQ 4.0 installations inside your datacenter. Our good friend John Willis wrote up his impressions on the importance of this new development in HQ’s architecture on his blog.

CloudStatus.com, our free cloud monitoring service is actually built on HQ 4.0 and has been running inside EC2 since inception. We use this experience to build the coolest, richest monitoring and management product for companies looking to deploy production web applications inside AWS. Over the next few weeks we’ll be announcing innovative pricing plans for users of this HQ 4.0 for AWS and additional management features aimed at letting HQ 4.0 users leverage the benefits of all Amazon Web Services as part of their applications.

Thanks again to all our developers, customers, and community members for helping us create this very exciting release.

“A recent IDC survey of IT executives, CIOs, and their line of business (LOB) colleagues shows that cloud services are ‘crossing the chasm’ and entering a period of widespread adoption. Moreover, IDC expects the cloud adoption trend to be amplified by the current financial crisis. The cloud model offers a much cheaper way for businesses to acquire and use IT – in an economic downturn, the appeal of that cost advantage will be greatly magnified. This advantage is especially important for small and medium businesses, a sector that will be key target in any plan for recovery.”

The report goes on to cite that spending on IT cloud services will triple in the next 5 years, reaching $42 billion and capturing 25% of IT spending growth in 2012 and nearly a third of growth the following year. With he overall IT market spend being $383 billion, this kind of growth validates that the opportunity deserves the attention it is getting.

IDC is also first to point out that its not just cloud vendors – the Amazons, Googles and Salesforces of the world will not get this pie exclusively. In fact, just as important are all the offerings that support the development, delivery and deployment of those consuming these services, which is the market Hyperic is in – bridging the gap for monitoring between the datacenter and the cloud

In fact, in the survey, two of the top 4 demands are areas that Hyperic is solving:

CloudStatus – providing real-time visibility into the health and availability of cloud providers, giving users a third-party perspective into SLAs

Hyperic HQ – providing real-time trending, analysis and control capabilities to maintain the performance of your web applications. This can run the gamut of possibilities from helping to improve the performance of your application, to making critical infrastructure architecture decisions quickly (e.g., spawning new virtualized resources or shifting loads from the cloud to your datacenter and vice-versa based on demand or performance changes).

I am sure there will continue to be pundits of all kinds of caliber, and while cloud computing may seem at times too much like inflated marketing-speak, the delivery model and innovative services that are powering this growth are unquestionable. Its nice to have some independent analyst numbers to back it up. Thanks Frank & all the rest of the IDC team for sharing this.

The failure of some of these finance giants reduced the amount of flowing capital in our market. There is a concept I learned at Penn State as an economics major, called the velocity of money. Its a co-efficient that basically says for every real dollar, it can be lent out multiple times and create an economy that can be, say worth 7 dollars for every real one dollar. Lender failures reduced that some. What has paralyzed it is headlines citing that you may not be able to get money out of ATMs. This reduces the number of “real dollars” to start from. This is the consumer – not these banks.

Capital is harder to come by because of both this top level problem of viable financial institutions to create the velocity factor and a reduced denominator of real dollars led by consumer mistrust of having money in the bank/stocks/etc.

Today I see this sensationalism crossing even more headlines of where it shouldn’t have gone in the first place. Barron’s is reporting Salesforce.com: Rain Clouds for Cloud Computing. Yes, there is reduced capital for companies looking to finance risky ventures. Cloud computing isn’t one.

Think about it. Cloud computing is all about a market of commoditized IT. It reduces the risk of IT investment – dramatically lowering the bar on the amount of capital needed to enter, as well as the liabilities extended liabilities if the investment failed. SAP suffering makes sense, its customers deal with an enormous amount of capital – and their investments are considerable and lengthy. Some pause there makes sense – especially given the panic the media is inciting.

Cloud computing is entirely designed for opportunists. Invention, innovation, and growth will be in this sector. Incumbents who drag significant historical costs with them when changing direction may have problems keeping up with a dynamic market and economy. They are going to stagnate. But IT providers and their customers that are investing in “pay-as-you-grow” IT investments that not only cuts costs but speeds time to market have nothing short of an explosive opportunity to redirect an enormous portion of IT investment dollars very quickly.

Salesforce is being judged by their traditional CRM business just like SAPs business, and it shouldn’t be. Apples and oranges. The CRM market is fairly saturated (I should know, I have 10 years of Siebel under my belt). Their Force.com is what they should be judged on – they’ve created an entire ready-to-use marketplace around innovating new products and services to their core customers. The opportunities there for innovative new companies to start up, and reach success quickly – and expand the usefulness of the Saleforce CRM deployment is nothing short of genius and has an awesome market opportunity to grow despite this economic climate. In fact, its success is probably going to accelerate because of it.

Earlier this year, we hit the limits of our existing hardware. We decided to move our wiki to its own setup and chose to move it to Contegix. Contegix of course, is a managed hosting provider that uses Hyperic HQ and specializes in managing Atlassian products like Confluence – Hyperic’s wiki. The migration and performance has been flawless, we know this since they share visibility with their customers to Hyperic HQ Enterprise. That is, until today.

I get an email this morning from Contegix Support:

Team:

We have recently received alerts for support.hyperic.com on hyperic01. At that time, the site was verified non-responsive. Upon investigation the instance had exceeded it’s allocated heap space. I’ve bumped this value from 1280 meg to 1536 meg, and restarted the instance. The site is responding properly now. Let us know if you need anything further.

Thanks,
-Chris

—
Contegix
Beyond Managed Hosting(r) for Your Enterprise

Since I was away from my computer, I check in with our Operations Admin first to find out how long it was going on and if he thinks everything is under control, and he says to me:

They were incredibly fast! We monitor the performance of that box with checks every minute. They responded and fixed it within that first minute we noticed it was having problems. Before I even had time to reach out to them, it was already fixed. That’s pretty much sub-minute response time, which just rocks.

It’s a nice reminder that eating your own dogfood has its benefits. One, it shows we have just as big of a stake in our software working as our customers, and two it has a nice by-product of getting to be your own customer testimonial! I think we should do more of it actually – I am going to organize some HyperCASTs with our scalability testing team, and ops teams to show some of our best practices in doing performance management and web operations for our own stuff. So stay tuned. More dogfood testimonials to come!

Don’t forget to check out Jeremy’s Beta Program Overview HyperCAST and log your 4.0 Beta Bugs in the Bugs Forum. Remember – those who bug stomp win some hot prizes – and to see exactly whose winning those hot prizes check out our Beta Program Leaderboard!

Happy Bug Stompin’, Hypericans

Click here to watch the interview.

This is a community initiative, geared to stomp as many bugs out of the 4.0 Beta as we can before it goes gold. Heck it may even go platinum. We plan on it being a four week, four release program, but it may be longer, depending on how infested we are.

What’s at stake? Making the product you use and love as good as it can be, for one. Bragging rights for being the bug stompingest community member out there. You can also earn some fabulous prizes. You know that polar fleece with the Hyperic logo that you always wanted? Consider it done. If you earn it that is.

So how does it work? It couldn’t be easier.

1. Download the 4.0 Beta.
2. Go to the Bugs Forum, and log the ever loving crud out of some bugs.
3. We award points on bugs discovered, validated and fixed.
4. We’ll track the leaders, so you can see how well you’re doing.
5. Repeat as necessary.
6. Lay back in your nice fleece and enjoy the warm glow of a fully operational 4.0.

That’s about it. I want to thank you in advance for all the installing, configuring, breaking, cursing, and nit picking that you’re about to do. If you want to learn more about all the advances and improvements coming in 4.0, check this out.

To find out what goodness 3.2.5 brings (and there’s a lot of goodness) please checkout the Release Notes. And if anyone happens to find my car keys somewhere within HQ 3.2.5, please let me know. It’s the only place I haven’t looked yet.

Thanks again to all that contributed good feature ideas and bug reports to this release!

That day we thought would never come, is upon us. The day when we decide to move from daily HyperLINKS posts, to weekly HyperLINKS posts.

Please join us in solemn reverence and remembrance. Now enjoy this, your final daily dose of HyperLINKS.

But fret not! The weekly post will be ever so much more savory for having to wait. Look for us every Wednesday, to help you get through the week.

]]> http://blog.hyperic.com/hyperlinks-august-18-2008/feed/ 0 http://blog.hyperic.com/meters-breakers-and-other-cloud-analogies/ http://blog.hyperic.com/meters-breakers-and-other-cloud-analogies/#comments Mon, 18 Aug 2008 01:59:27 +0000 Javier Soltero http://blog-staging.hyperic.com/hyperic/?p=377 Dave was kind enough to invite me to guest post on his blog at CNET about the subject of operations and the cloud. For those who dont regularly read Dave’s blog, here’s the post in its entirety…

The separation of Cloud offerings around consumption of resources versus consumption of applications makes a lot of sense. Regardless of the use case, the idea that a business might choose the Cloud as a platform to build and consume applications because it inherently reduces or removes the operational burden is ridiculous.

The simple reason is that software, regardless of who is developing it, always fails. Those who refute that point haven’t been around technology long enough or haven’t paid attention to the fact that every single ‘Cloud’ has had outages recently.

Enterprise software consumers (the folks whose money most Cloud providers are looking to get) know better than to assume that any new platform (whether it’s “the Cloud” or Linux or Java) is inherently management free. Because of this, I’m confident that until management technology (including everything from provisioning to monitoring) matures, the enterprise will still regard the Cloud as a place to do science experiments.

The big question is what role do Cloud providers have in providing management technology to their customers. All Cloud providers have management tooling they use for their own internal operations (a lot of them use Hyperic HQ!).

The problem is that consumers of those services are looking at the services from a completely different vantage point than their providers. Taking the “power utility” analogy often applied to Amazon.com as an example, you can imagine the difference between the tools used by folks like PG&E to manage the power grid versus the single meter and breaker panels you have in your own house.

Those meters at your house are there to provide the necessary ‘local’ management for a utility whose backend infrastructure you don’t see, can’t understand, and don’t care to manage. Without those meters and breakers you wouldn’t trust billing, service levels, or even be able to manage problems like broken appliances. To take this one (rather ridiculous) step further, imagine if every time you wanted to install a new light fixture you had to call up PG&E to tell them to shut off power to that section of your house so you don’t fry yourself.

So, what are the Cloud’s equivalent for the on-premise electric meter and circuit breakers? Many smart people are chasing to answer that question. Unfortunately, as Dave and others have identified, the Cloud does not have the level of standardization that the power grid does. Each Cloud runs at its own ‘voltage’ and has ‘power sockets’ that are shaped differently and that will make it very difficult to come up with a single solution. There’s been a lot of discussion about the impact openness and standardization will have on the viability of the Cloud as a platform but not enough of that discussion has focused on where manageability fits in.

This will take some time to sort out. In the meantime, Hyperic has chosen to start by providing a transparent, free, third party mechanism to demonstrate the health and performance of the various Cloud offerings called CloudStatus.

In order for the Cloud to be trusted like the power grid is, there needs to be a place where both Cloud providers and consumers can see real-time information about how these complex environments are behaving from a customers’ perspective.

CloudStatus is monitoring the various Clouds by both running inside and outside their respective environments, and displaying the performance and health information in a way that is simple enough for the customer to understand. The service was also designed to provide visibility into multiple Cloud environments regardless of the type of offering.

Ultimately, the goal is to give the consumers of the Cloud visibility while allowing providers to prove the reliability and performance benefits of the platforms they offer.

]]> http://blog.hyperic.com/hyperlinks-august-8-2008/feed/ 0 http://blog.hyperic.com/hyperlinks-august-7-2008/ http://blog.hyperic.com/hyperlinks-august-7-2008/#comments Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:48:00 +0000 Hyperic Press Desk http://blog-staging.hyperic.com/hyperic/?p=368 Thursday’s topics…Dell case lingers on, Gmail shines a bad light on the cloud