HP SiteScope 1 - Introduction

There are many tools available in market for monitoring application software and hardware resources in pre production and production environment. Some have the diagnostics capabilities where we can deep dive straight into the bottleneck and figure out the root cause while some are used passively just to monitor resources. Some are agent based i.e. they will communicate with the server where agents specifically designed to understand server platform are installed and correlate those readings and present them to the user, while some are agent less which do not require any installation on the server side.

HP Sitescope is agent less resource metrics monitoring tool which is one of the most easily deployable monitoring tool around. The main purpose this tool is to check application availability and performance of application and infrastructure in distributive application environment. 

Some of the features of SiteScope are as following –

1) Accessible from both Web and Mobile platforms – Sitescope is a web based application and can be accessed from mobiles too. You can provide the URL of Sitescope server (something like http://<serverip>:<port)/SiteScope/servlet/Main) in the address bar of any browser from anywhere or provide Host, Port, Protocol, Username and Password information in HP Sitescope Android application.

For downloading free version of Sitescope use this link - HP SiteScope Free Edition

 

For downloading HP Sitescope Android application use this link - HPE Sitescope Android App

 

If we are using trial version of Sitescope we will not be able to use mobile application to connect to Sitescope server hence I will not be able to cover the mobile access part.

2) Agent less monitoring – Sitescope do not require any agents to be installed on remote servers for collecting resource metrics from them. Since it is agent less it is very easy to maintain and use.

3) Real time performance monitoring – SiteScope provides monitoring of application and infrastructure resources in real time. SiteScope provides dashboard for real time observation of these resources.

Following snapshot show the “SiteScope” dashboard view which I have installed on my laptop and added three monitors namely CPU, Memory and Logical disk (PerfMon counter) to it. This is a real time view of these resources on my machine.

4) Vast number of monitors – Sitescope provides large number of monitors for each layer of complex and distributed enterprise application. It provides monitors for web servers, application servers, data base servers, citrix applications and so on. In total it offers more than 100 types of monitors.

Following is the list of monitors available in HP SiteScope as per HP Site –

 

  

5) Alerts – Sitescope as in other tools like CA Wily Introscope is capable of sending application health alerts based on pre conditions set by us. Sitescope can be configured as to which monitors can trigger alerts, what are the conditions which should be met before triggering the alerts, what is the information to be contained in alerts, what kind of alert (email or sound) to trigger and who will get those alerts.

Following snapshot shows an Alert created by me on my lap top if CPU utilization on it goes beyond 90% it will trigger a email to me.

6) Reports – SiteScope has the ability to provide detailed reports on both server health and also application health. There are many types of reports that Sitescope can generate like Alerts report, Management reports, Monitor reports, Quick reports and Server centric reports. The most commonly used reports by performance testing and engineering guys, and their purpose is explained below – 

a) Quick reports – Enables us to view data of our selected monitors or monitor groups during a specified time interval.

b) Server centric reports – These reports report the CPU, Memory and Network Utilization metrics on Windows or UNIX based systems.

For example below is the quick report which I have extracted for CPU on my laptop.

HP SiteScope Quick Report Demo 

7) Templates – One of the best features of SiteScope is it allows creation and deployment of templates. Templates are group of monitors and configurations which can be deployed across different testing or production environments which share common characteristics. In templates we can define the groups, monitors, variables (values which may be different for different environments like server usernames, passwords etc) and configurations and can reuse these again and again. This along with standardization of our monitoring also eases deploying configurations for it. 

There are two types of templates provided by SiteScope –

a) User defined templates – Created by the SiteScope users as per their needs by both copying existing groups and monitor characteristics or by manually creating templates by defining groups, monitors, servers and alerts in it.

b) Solution templates – SiteScope also offers standardized templates for existing applications and networks. These can be deployed in “as it is” condition since these contain pre set monitors, and configurations for monitoring targeted systems. 

Note – Solution templates can only be deployed by acquiring licence for deploying them in the targeted system.

For example following is the snapshot of Solution templates available in HP Sitescope -

HP Site Scope Licensing Information – 

HP SiteScope licensing is point based i.e. different types of monitors require different monitor points. In other words SiteScope is sold as per monitoring power rather than software image copies. For example If we want to monitor IBM DB2 application, 1 monitor allow us to monitor 10 performance metrics  for this application but 1 point is required to monitor 1 performance metric hence we require 10 monitor point to monitor all 10 metrics on a single instance of DB2 application. One more example is if we want to monitor CPU Utilization on any resource, 1 monitor monitors this metrics so only 1 monitor point is required to monitor 1 instance.

Hence following are the two factors according to which SiteScope monitors are created –

a) Total monitor points purchased.

b) Types of monitors required to monitor current system.

So if we go by above example and have a system where we have two DB2 instances (On single host) in our application which we want to monitor and we want to monitor 10 DB2 metrics for each instance and also the CPU utilization on the host machine we need to do following calculations –

For CPU utilization Monitors -

Number of CPU instances to monitor = 1

Number of metrics per monitor = 1

Total points required = 1*1 = 1 point

For DB2 Monitors - 

Number DB2 instances to monitor = 2

Number of metrics per monitor = 10

Total points required = 2*20 = 20 points

So number of monitor points required for this system = 1 + 20 = 21

For more information on licensing refer to following document. This document is taken from HP SiteScope site.

HP SiteScope License Information 

HP SiteScope Monitoring Basics–

Since HP SiteScope is agent less monitoring tool it can be deployed in quick time. Since it is very easy to deploy HP SiteScope for monitoring I will briefly describe how easily this can be done. HP SiteScope contains more than 100 application and infrastructure monitors each requiring different configuring steps, but all these steps can be divided in three phases of installation as follows –

1) Specify Resource Metrics to monitor – First step in configuring monitors for a specific resource in SiteScope is to specify which monitor we want to setup for the given resource. Suppose I want to setup monitor for CPU utilization monitor on my local laptop I need to specify that by selecting “CPU” monitor from the available list of “Monitors” in HP SiteScope as shown in following snapshot -

 

 

2) Locate resource – Next step is to tell HP SiteScope where the resource is located for which we are trying to read its CPU Utilization and how can HP SiteScope communicate with that resource.  The resource we want to monitor must be able to communicate with HP SiteScope so we need to specify the information required to connect that resource to HP SiteScope. This includes Server IP Address, Username and Password required to connect to that server, method of connection, port number and connection limit etc. Following snapshot shows an example of settings we need to provide while setting a monitor on a remote “Windows Server”.

 

3) Specify Monitor settings – Now that HP SiteScope is capable of reaching the resource and read its metrics next information we need to provide to SiteScope is how frequently it should run the monitor, if error occurs when should it re run the monitor to check that error was not a false alert, if error occurs how frequently it should run the monitor, What are the threshold values to define an error, warning or good condition for the metric etc.

We can specify that as I have shown in following snapshot.