Tag Archives: monitoring

ManageEngine launches cloud-based remote monitoring and management solution 

ManageEngine, the enterprise IT management division of Zoho Corporation, has launched Endpoint Central MSP Cloud, which it says brings the advantages of the cloud’s scalability, flexibility, and efficiency to the remote monitoring and management (RMM) of endpoints for managed service providers (MSPs). The launch also completes the first stage of the company’s vision for a… Read more »

The post ManageEngine launches cloud-based remote monitoring and management solution  appeared first on Cloud Computing News.

Cisco, Elastica join forces on cloud security monitoring

Cisco will resell Elastica's cloud service monitoring technology

Cisco will resell Elastica’s cloud service monitoring technology

Networking giant Cisco is teaming up with Elastica, a cloud security startup, in a move that will see the two firms combine their threat intelligence and cloud service monitoring technologies.

The partnership will also see Cisco resell Elastica’s cloud application security and monitoring solution (CloudSOC) to its customers.

“The combination of Cisco’s threat-centric security portfolio and Elastica’s innovation in cloud application security provides a unique opportunity. Our global customers gain additional levels of visibility and control for cloud applications and it enhances our portfolio of advanced cloud-delivered security offerings,” said Scott Harrell, vice president of product management, Cisco Security Business Group.

“We are excited to partner with Elastica to deliver an even richer portfolio of on–premises and cloud application security to protect businesses across the attack continuum – before, during, and after an attack,” Harrell said.

The move is a big win for Elastica, a startup that existed stealth in early 2014 and just last month secured $30m in funding. Cisco will provide the security startup with a large and varied channel that spans both the enterprise and scale-out markets, while Cisco can plug a gap in its burgeoning cloud-centric portfolio (that said, it’s possible the move is a precursor to an acquisition).

“CIOs want to empower employees with advanced cloud apps that help enterprises stay agile, productive and competitive in the marketplace. The power of these cloud apps – information sharing and built-in collaboration capabilities – also require a completely new approach to security,” said Rehan Jalil, president and chief executive of Elastica.

“Elastica’s cloud app security technology, together with Cisco’s broad security portfolio and footprint, will help us catalyze the safe and compliant use of cloud apps so that our customers can continue to securely make their businesses more agile and productive,” Jalil said.

The Operational Consistency Proxy

#devops #management #webperf Cloud makes more urgent the need to consistently manage infrastructure and its policies regardless of where that infrastructure might reside

f5friday

While the potential for operational policy (performance, security, reliability, access, etc..) diaspora is often mentioned in conjunction with cloud, it remains a very real issue within the traditional data center as well. Introducing cloud-deployed resources and applications only serves to exacerbate the problem.

F5 has long offered a single-pane of glass management solution for F5 systems with Enterprise Manager (EM) and recently introduced significant updates that increase its scope into the cloud and broaden its capabilities to simplify the increasingly complex operational tasks associated with managing security, performance, and reliability in a virtual world.

f5em2.0AUTOMATE COMMON TASKS

The latest release of F5 EM includes enhancements to its ability to automate common tasks such as configuring and managing SSL certificates, managing policies, and enabling/disabling resources which assists in automating provisioning and de-provisioning processes as well as automating what many might consider mundane – and yet critical – maintenance window operations.

Updating policies, too, assists in maintaining operational consistency across all F5 solutions – whether in the data center or in the cloud. This is particularly important in the realm of security, where control over access to applications is often far less under the control of IT than even the business would like. Combining F5’s cloud-enabled solutions such as F5 Application Security Manager (ASM) and Access Policy Manager (APM) with the ability for F5 EM to manage such distributed instances in conjunction with data center deployed instances provides for consistent enforcement of security and access policies for applications regardless of their deployment location. For F5 ASM specifically, this extends to Live Signature updates, which can be downloaded by F5 EM and distributed to managed instances of F5 ASM to ensure the most up-to-date security across enterprise concerns.

The combination of centralized management with automation also ensures rapid response to activities such as the publication of CERT advisories. Operators can quickly determine from the centralized inventory the impact of such a vulnerability and take action to redress the situation.

INTEGRATED PERFORMANCE METRICS real-time-app-perf-monitoring-cloud-dc

F5 EM also includes an option to provision a Centralized Analytics Module. This module builds on F5’s visibility into application performance based on its strategic location in the architecture – residing in front of the applications for which performance is a concern. Individual instances of F5 solutions can be directed to gather a plethora of application performance related statistics, which is then aggregated and reported on by application in EM’s Centralized Analytics Module.

These metrics enable capacity planning, troubleshooting and can be used in conjunction with broader business intelligence efforts to understand the performance of applications and its related impact whether those applications are in the cloud or in the data center. This global monitoring extends to F5 device health and performance, to ensure infrastructure services scale along with demand. 

Monitoring includes:

  • Device Level Visibility & Monitoring
  • Capacity Planning
  • Virtual Level & Pool Member Statistics
  • Object Level Visibility
  • Near Real-Time Graphics
  • Reporting

In addition to monitoring, F5 EM can collect actionable data upon which thresholds can be determined and alerts can be configured.

Alerts include:

  • Device status change
  • SSL certificate expiration
  • Software install complete
  • Software copy failure
  • Statistics data threshold
  • Configuration synchronization
  • Attack signature update
  • Clock skew

When thresholds are reached, triggers send an alert via email, SNMP trap or syslog event. More sophisticated alerting and inclusion in broader automated, operational systems can be achieved by taking advantage of F5’s control-plane API, iControl. F5 EM is further able to proxy iControl-based applications, eliminating the need to communicate directly with each BIG-IP deployed.

OPERATIONAL CONSISTENCY PROXY

By acting as a centralized management and operational console for BIG-IP devices, F5 EM effectively proxies operational consistency across the data center and into the cloud. Its ability to collect and aggregate metrics provides a comprehensive view of application and infrastructure performance across the breadth and depth of the application delivery chain, enabling more rapid response to incidents whether performance or security related.

F5 EM ensures consistency in both infrastructure configuration and operational policies, and actively participates in automation and orchestration efforts that can significantly decrease the pressure on operations when managing the critical application delivery network component of a highly distributed, cross-environment architecture.

Additional Resources:

Happy Managing!


Connect with Lori: Connect with F5:
o_linkedin[1] google  o_rss[1] o_twitter[1]   o_facebook[1] o_twitter[1] o_slideshare[1] o_youtube[1] google

Related blogs & articles:


read more