Monitoring systems and networks

Use an established and perennial monitoring solution

OpenMaster is a standard, powerful and robust solution. No need to fear spikes in traffic. It monitors hundreds of alerts per second. It has a log capacity of millions. However, your operators have a synthetic view of the professional impact, making their actions highly efficient.

OpenMaster continually takes state of the art monitoring technologies into account. You define your own principles of intelligent correlation of alarms to analyse the impact on your professional processes. You can visualise the status of your infrastructure in your web browser, with operator access control based on their roles.

OpenMaster will also stay up to date with your technologies. You can monitor your traditional infrastructure and your new Web Services architecture. You can develop it freely, independently of your operating systems or network protocols such as IPv6.

Guarantee the service quality of your internal procedures

OpenMaster qualifies, enriches and correlates alarms and aligns them with your professional vision. Your operators therefore benefit from both an overview of the causes of incidents behind problems and the alarms raised about your applications and internal procedures.

Isolating incidents with this tool will become the preferred way for your operators to manage the effective operations of your information system and to anticipate service outages.

To help them and reduce the monitoring load, OpenMaster itself reacts automatically and instantly to alarms that have been qualified, which have rules defining the appropriate set of actions to be taken.

Apply your company rules to the monitoring

Implement OpenMaster in compliance with your own rules for security and resilience:

• Apply an access policy to your monitoring operators: they are authenticated, you control the monitoring domains attributed to them and the actions they are authorised to undertake on the features of these domains
• Secure your communications with managed equipment, with encoding and special protocols such as SNMP v3
• The solution has native access to high-availability functions: you maintain constant network monitoring and access to your equipment
• You can federate several levels of geographical or organisational administration: each level is managed locally and provides a synthesis of its status for higher or adjacent levels, with the redundancy that you require

Structure your network operations centre

OpenMaster is used in the monitoring centres where several operators manage complex environments.

Several administrative entities, that correspond for example to geographical or functional areas, work together to administer your entire environment, such as a telecommunications network or an operations centre.

The monitoring is delegated per party according to specialist profiles, and each operator processes a sub-set of events relevant to their area of responsibility. Your operators exchange information and interact with one another in accordance with an appropriate and controlled workflow. Their presence, their allocation and the monitoring are managed by the system.

Thus OpenMaster implements a system which is controlled and administered by interactions between several operators or groups of operators in the operating centre of a telecommunications infrastructure network. In fact, in a crisis situation, it is crucial to allow your operators to have a discussion, to entrust the most qualified staff with the processing of anomalies that are critical or too complicated for less experienced operators.

The overall time spent on fixing problems will improve, which is fundamental for monitoring your critical infrastructure, whose maintenance in operational condition is vital.

Visualise the impact on your internal procedures

Monitoring applications, systems and network equipment in order to measure and anticipate the impact on your professional services is one of OpenMaster's specialities. Events processing takes place in 2 steps:

1. Pre-qualification: incoming events are classified by category using rich filters
2. Correlation with the impact analysis: the category established during the pre-qualification is correlated with "service" visibility

OpenMaster thus demonstrates the advantage of correlating alarms for the purposes of the impact analysis, as they are actually used in your environment. The first phase of qualifying incident alarms is powerful and the definition of categories is easily carried out by the solution administrator. The second phase of correlation supports an important feed for alarms and offers a synthesis of incident impacts, becoming the preferred way for your operators to manage the effective operations of your information system and to anticipate service outages.

The monitoring is done in real time through a browser, deliberately displaying a low level of visibility and/or visibility at the level of your professional services. Reports provide a subsequent synthesis of events and the status of your services.

Federate alert monitoring

OpenMaster is also suitable for extended use, with a hierarchy of monitoring domains, in which each level is managed locally but also provides a synthesis of its status for the level above (local – regional – national monitoring).

The whole system has access to all the functions offered by OpenMaster at every level, particularly:

• High availability
• The management of transitions from working hours to non-working hours, and appropriate responses of the infrastructure
• The correlation of events at all levels

To help you improve your monitoring, OpenMaster has an open Java EE architecture, to offer you improved access at every level to all sources of external information. All the product's functions can be extended, and improved compatibility is guaranteed. Numerous plug-ins can recognise new sources of events, configuration and inventory databases, complete the graphic rendering and modify the presentation of the synoptics.

OpenMaster naturally plays the role of super-monitor, synthesising information from adjacent or independent monitoring centres, or those linked in a chain. It also provides monitoring at each level, and interfaces natively with all the monitoring solutions already in place, open source or proprietary.