(Third of a six-part blog series that describes how a team of IT pros and managers at one 
of the world’s largest global banks accommodated a bank acquisition and mastered a complex messaging environment.)
Bringing Light to the Dark Side…
Nastel’s AutoPilot was already effectively monitoring MegaBank’s WebSphere MQ and homegrown MOM systems. However, while the bank trusted TIBCO, the IT team wanted to integrate TIBCO messaging products into an umbrella monitoring framework.
But was this a “nice-to-have” or a “must-have” situation? It proved to be the latter, because in large enterprise environments like MegaBank’s, with many interdependent applications constantly in flux, the speed and ease of adapting to constant change is key. Although AutoPilot’s enables the addition of new EMS servers or Rendezvous daemons in minutes, configuring TIBCO Hawk to monitor them wasn’t so much a problem of time; instead, it was a silo approach to the general need for middleware availability. The best approach would be to consolidate to fewer or only a single monitoring system. Better still would be to implement policies and decrease old-school “eyes-on-screen monitoring” and instead automate problem detection and false alarm suppression.
Bearing in mind the bank’s desire to consolidate software systems where possible, and ever-present IT resource constraints, deploying AutoPilot monitoring was an easy choice. As an added benefit and cost saving, IT team member training would be limited to a single monitoring system.
So the IT team was making progress. By standardizing all application performance monitoring under Nastel AutoPilot, MegaBank would gain significantly from simplifying procedures, reducing vendor counts, and improving the overall quality and efficiency of monitoring. Specifically, the team would benefit from:
- Unified monitoring and management procedures across all middleware technologies with a single tool
- A single portal for administration and certification of user permissions and access
- Easy and fast creation of powerful processing rules (utilizing Nastel’s Complex Events Processing engine) that could be applied to all middleware transports for end-to-end monitoring
Taking the Pulse of Solace
AutoPilot would monitor multiple Solace appliances, harvesting their events and analyzing them in correlation with other middleware and system events via the AutoPilot CEP (Complex Event Processing) engine. By combining monitoring of Solace software environment components with hardware inventory and assets (e.g., blades, power modules, fans, etc.), the IT team arrived at a comprehensive command and control solution.
Analytics included:
- Appliance specifications
- Appliance Incoming/outgoing data statistics
- Cache and cache-level statistics
- Router clients and queues
- Hardware properties and specifications
- VPNs and VPN-level statistics
- Current/max messages spooled
Measuring DataPower
The deployment of WebSphere DataPower appliances for message transformation and routing between the WebSphere MQ and TIBCO middleware messaging systems played to Nastel’s strengths in both middleware monitoring and message tracking (much more about the latter will be covered in another blog post). The ability to provide deep operational monitoring for DataPower and provide a unified view across all middleware messaging solutions was important to MegaBank’s IT team.
Nastel AutoPilot Expert for DataPower provided analytics on:
- DataPower’s system resource consumption over time
- DataPower metrics
- DataPower’s performance of key business activities
- Routing and transformation history
- Correlation of DataPower performance data with events from other systems
With unified monitoring and control capabilities established for the messaging appliances deployed across the combined infrastructure landscape, MegaBank’s team was ready to complete the task of uniting all middleware monitoring under the AutoPilot umbrella.
Tune in next week for the next installment of Making a Happy Marriage of WebSphere & TIBCO Infrastructures – Part 4.
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