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!

The highlight of the HyperCAST is a Jira integration piece that took about 5 minutes.

HyperCAST 8 was all about upgrading to Hyperic HQ 3.2.x. It includes some live demos of upgrades in action, and covers upgrades for bundles, separate databases, and separate JRE’s.

HyperCAST 9 was Hyperic en espanol – and it was conducted completely in Spanish.

Enjoy! And remember, you can always register for upcoming HyperCASTs and view archives at hyperic.com/demo/hypercasts.html

David Hustace, OpenNMS President and Charles Lee, co-founder and VP of Engineering at Hyperic, teamed up together to discuss and show how Hyperic & OpenNMS work together. The HyperCAST was popular indeed, with for the first time ever in the history of HyperCASTs (ok, this is only #10) we had 2 analysts attend and several customers call in before the session to secure their place in line for implementing the anticipated integration. All the attention definitely got us excited, and I think it shows through in the session itself.

To sum it up for you non-viewers out there, or to whet your whistle – the integration shows how complimentary both solutions are. OpenNMS does a fabulous job doing agent-less monitoring and management automation that is well suited for your hardware needs, Hyperic does agent-based deep metric collection on all your software and services. Put them together and you get an end-to-end, scalable, java-based application, system and network monitoring and management solution. Together the two products can:

• Share inventory
• Share alerts
  • Includes alert reduction system to consolidate repeated alerts
  • Alerts that are generated in Hyperic feature a detailed drill-down into HQ from OpenNMS
• Benefit from OpenNMS workflows including integration into Trouble Ticket systems
• Monitor Hyperic Server & Agent from OpenNMS to ensure HQ is available, and plot response times

Finally, we shared a roadmap to include:

• Alarm action synchronization (ack, escalation, etc) to allow you to react to an alarm from either system
• Executive Reporting to roll up Performance and Availability Reporting from both systems using JasperReports
• Creating an Agent Map icon in OpenNMS that will allow you to activate Hyperic Controls directly from OpenNMS

I hope you enjoy the webinar, and feel free to discuss these out on the Hyperic Forums or the OpenNMS mailing lists. And if you are interested in more details on services or support for this integration, since Hyperic and OpenNMS are now partners, you can contact either Hyperic or OpenNMS for more information and we’ll work together to set you up with the support and services you need.

1. Systems Management Taxonomy – Systems Management is a BIG term. It has many disciplines within it. We have application management, systems management, provisioning, network management, configuration management, and the list goes on. The reality is most people think it encompasses application, system and network management. Hyperic does a great job up in the application and systems level – especially for custom-built, heterogeneous stack web-based infrastructure. We do some level of Network management, but it is small potatoes compared to OpenNMS. A public announcement and partnership (not to mention blog posts) will make more people understand quickly that we’re very different – and they need us both!
2. Customers need Hyperic & OpenNMS – smart customers have realized how complimentary we are for a while. They’ve been implementing our products side by side the hard way – trying to figure out how to work with each company and who to engage to get the work done. And paying, either with dollars or time & effort spent, integrating our products. We’ve seen it enough times, and we’ve responded to the community at large – we’re committed to making this easier.
3. Why Hyperic & OpenNMS are seen so often together – At conferences, in our offices, at customers and maybe even over a few margaritas… we’ve gotten to know Tarus, Dave & the OpenNMS gang pretty well over the past year. Personally, I have found them to be incredible veterans of the industry – equally part sage and sarcastic, they keep working the hardest problems because they have such tremendous passion for it. I have had a chance to meet with several of their customers as well, and they share that enthusiasm for all things OpenNMS. And being such masters of their domain, I view their endorsement of Hyperic HQ as one of the biggest public compliments we can have. And to that, on behalf of Hyperic, I say thank you!

And if you’d like to see and hear more about what this partnership has in store for our communities, please join Dave & Charles next Tuesday at 11 am PST for our HyperCAST. Or read Dave’s whitepaper on the integration.

So, when we were talking last month about what we should add to January’s schedule – I wondered out loud, why not work with Mosso to talk about managing virtualization? Not many people get it. Its not easy. I still see statistics citing more than half of production experiments with virtualization fail. I think some of that has to do with not being prepared for, as Jonathan calls it, the obfuscation of the architecture. It makes the whole environment harder to read, and introduces a new layer that actually taxes the the hardware and makes troubleshooting hard to do. Yesterday, we recorded that HyperCAST and it is now posted for replay. If you want to check it out, hear all the stories and see what works, you can do so here.