Interview: Hyperic on Scalability, and Monitoring Performance
by Sam Dean - May. 27, 2008Comments (2)- Related Blog Posts
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Hyperic, an open source web infrastructure management software provider, has been in the news lately. The company’s flagship product, Hyperic HQ, was a finalist in the 23rd Annual CODiE Awards. Hyperic HQ specializes in monitoring applications for IT departments, and the company recently announced test results showing Hyperic HQ doing very large scale monitoring in conjunction with Sun's MySQL database. OStatic checked in with Stacey Schneider, Senior Director of Marketing for Hyperic, for thoughts on how open source software can play a part in highly scalable monitoring deployments.
OStatic: Hyperic recently demonstrated massive scalability efficacy for MySQL deployments. Tell us about how you tested this and what it means for organizations doing database and monitoring implementations.
Stacey Schneider: We performed two tests, one which established an actual load and another which cleared a backlog in order to reach a peak performance spike. These tests essentially validate that transaction-heavy enterprise applications can scale impressively with MySQL.
Hyperic’s market demographic consists heavily of web-driven companies that have an affinity for MySQL. It’s critical that we support MySQL at scale because the DBA’s that power those web applications prefer to have everything run on MySQL. This makes it easier for them to support the applications that are supporting their applications.
OStatic: Many of your customers cite your software as assisting them in scaling their web applications. How, for those to whom scaling is a sudden and new problem, does it help do that?
Stacey Schneider: We make it easier for our customers to see exactly where a problem is occurring so that they can quickly correct things before issues escalate. Immediately on deployment, Hyperic technology auto-discovers and starts monitoring key performance metrics across the majority of the components companies use to build their web applications.
The technology is agent-based, which gives us insight into all the software and services running on a physical—or virtual—instance. This granular level of detail helps administrators establish dependencies and trend performance changes and bottlenecks. They can also easily add any event data (such as log data, configuration changes, security info, control actions and alerts) that they want to track alongside performance data in order to better understand what changed or where problems occurred.
OStatic: How does the Auto-Discovery feature work?
Stacey Schneider: It’s pretty cool. We have developed a way to “fingerprint” the applications running on a machine by scanning the process table and matching specific application instances to one of the 70+ different technologies we support out-of-the-box. One of the hallmarks of web companies is that they are constantly adding new technologies to the mix, and we know that we can’t keep up on our own so we make it easy for users to create additional management plugins and provide the necessary “fingerprint” information for any technology that they want to add.
OStatic: What kinds of emerging technologies, such as virtualization, aren't being monitored and handled properly by IT managers, where an open source solution could solve problems?
Stacey Schneider: Virtualization certainly isn’t being managed properly – in fact, only about 2 percent of companies are adequately addressing it. We blogged this week about some new research around the lack of virtualization management and the “V-Motion Sickness” that a large majority of IT departments are experiencing as a result.
This problem only magnifies as you move past server virtualization and into the cloud, where all the hardware is virtualized. The rates of change in those environments are enormous, and many of the virtualization technologies developed to power them obfuscate critical relationships between the various layers powering applications. Without clear visibility, admins are at an unprecedented disadvantage to meeting their SLAs. We’re working hard with cloud providers like Rackspace’s Mosso and cloud subscribers such as Coghead alike to help tackle these emerging challenges.
OStatic: What would you say the advantages of being open source are in Hyperic's case? Can you cite any anecdotal evidence for how the community improves your software?
Stacey Schneider: Today’s IT professional is completely overworked. They don’t wait for a phone call from someone to explain to them a new way to solve their problems. They don’t even answer the phone. They rely on the web to help them solve problems quickly. When things go wrong they need immediate answers and providing a web-based open source option that can literally be up and running in minutes empowers them to solve problems fast.
For those who have added complexity and scale, our open source software gives them a stepping stone where they can safely try us out before making a commitment to buy. For companies that want to make the transition from our open source to our enterprise product, we have an internal champion who is knowledgeable and successful with our software that works with them to so ensure that the purchasing process is as frictionless as possible. We believe this educated ownership model helps users to be successful and helps Hyperic to quickly identify and close real potential customers more effectively.
OStatic: If we head into an extended recession, do you think open source in general will benefit? Will IT-focused OSS solutions benefit disproportionately?
Stacey Schneider: IT has always had pressure to do more with less, and to do it smarter. Open source is increasingly core to their ability to accomplish this. Only open source technology gives IT access to a broad community of peers, all examining and collaborating to solve a problem. By its nature, open source builds in the capacity for greater innovation, which helps IT keep pace with emerging challenges—such as how to manage new technologies like virtualization and cloud computing.
What a recession may do is put pressure on companies to institute policies to review more open source/affordable solutions. We see this often overseas. France, for example, has long been a strong champion of using open source wherever possible.
What won’t change is that smart IT people will never spend a dime on software that doesn’t work. This is actually great for open source. As we’ve seen, open source companies are a hotbed of innovation and more likely to solve modern, relevant problems of today. The fact that it is usually more economical is gravy.
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