Systems Management and Monitoring

As the first Red Hat Premier Partner in the UK you would expect us to recommend technology from the Red Hat ecosystem. However, we do so in this instance solely on the basis that Red Hat Network Satellite (RHN) makes enterprise Linux so deployable, scalable and manageable.

It is an easy-to-use systems management platform for your growing Linux infrastructure. Built on open standards, RHN Satellite provides powerful systems administration capabilities such as management, provisioning and monitoring for large deployments.

Satellite allows you to manage many servers as easily as you would one. RHN Satellite is a systems management platform that makes Linux deployable, scalable, manageable, and consistent.

It provides administrators with the tools to efficiently manage their systems lowering per-system, deployment, and management costs. RHN Satellite also offers superior security by having a single centralized tool, secure connection policies for remote administration, and secure content. Use RHN Satellite to ensure security fixes and configuration files are applied across your environment consistently.

Advantages of using RHN Satellite Server include:

• Security - an end-to-end secure connection is maintained from the client systems to the RHN Satellite Server without connecting to the public Internet.
• Efficiency - packages are delivered significantly faster over a local area network.
• Control - clients' System Profiles are stored on the local RHN Satellite Server, not on the central Red Hat Network Servers.
• Customised updates - create a truly automated package delivery system for custom software packages required by client systems, as well as Red Hat packages. Custom channels allow fine-grained control of the delivery of custom packages.
• Access control - system administrators can be restricted to access only those systems within their maintenance responsibilities.
• Bandwidth management - the bandwidth used for transactions between the clients and the RHN Satellite Server is controlled by the organization on the local area network; RHN Satellite Server clients do not have to compete with other clients accessing the central Red Hat Network file servers.
• Scalability - RHN Satellite Server may oversee an entire organization's servers in combination with RHN Proxy Server.

Puppet is one of the leading OS platforms for IT systems management and as the leaders in Linux we recommend it.

Puppet is an enterprise systems management platform that standardises the way IT staff deploy and manage infrastructure in the enterprise and the cloud.

By automating the provisioning, patching, and configuration of operating system and application components across infrastructure, Puppet enables IT staff to master their infrastructure even as complexity grows.

Moving to the Cloud and the Rise of DevOps

The shift to cloud-based services has dramatically altered the IT landscape as we know it. Enterprise infrastructure borders have expanded beyond the firewall and now include hosted applications and infrastructure from Amazon Web Services and other providers.
Puppet helps DevOps teams meet their common objectives, creating a seamless IT infrastructure across departments, reducing cost and increasing productivity.

Proven Performance

Puppet is used by thousands of organisations to manage millions of nodes. Many of the largest and most innovative companies rely on Puppet to control their infrastructure in a scalable, flexible and consistent manner. With the addition of Puppet Enterprise, organisations now have a distribution of Puppet that includes simplified integration and installation, certified testing by Puppet Labs and a deployment that is always up to date.

Rapid & Reusable Configuration

Puppet’s scalable, model-driven approach allows you to configure systems by defining their desired state in the form of reusable modules that you can quickly deploy across thousands of servers. The right box gets the right configuration, automatically, every time. This minimises the waste of repetitive tasks and error-prone scripts, giving you the ability to configure hundreds of machines in minutes and leaving you with more time to focus on bigger issues.

Infrastructure Agility

Puppet’s declarative language lets you define your “infrastructure as code” to describe your configurations and the relationships between resources, maximizing flexibility. You can now easily change your configurations in one place or achieve cloud portability for projects that now make economic sense on internal data centers. Puppet has the ability to simulate deployments, giving you the agility to make small—and big—changes without disruption to your infrastructure.

Automated Compliance

Our visual Dashboard and reporting tools give you access to an automatically maintained asset inventory—and all the relationships between each component—and report every change. This insight combined with Puppet’s rapid configuration ability helps you keep your infrastructure in its desired state. And because it’s easy to make changes to your system configuration, keeping up with security and compliance mandates is hassle-free.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

Puppet users worldwide have contributed documentation and code to improve the product in real-world deployments. With the Puppet Forge you can reuse modules developed by experts in the Puppet community and on your team, giving you access to modules that help you get up and running quickly with the solutions that serve your business.

Works with Your Existing Systems

Puppet Labs has developed APIs that integrate Puppet with many existing operations tools such as ticketing software or security monitoring systems, giving you deeper insight into your infrastructure and further automating your operations.

Be the Master of your Infrastructure

With Puppet you can standardize and simplify the management of your growing infrastructure, giving you the confidence that your systems are compliant and secure.

If you want to go beyond basic IT monitoring capabilities then Nagios is the enterprise-class monitoring and alerting solution of choice as it provides organisations with extended insight of their IT infrastructure before problems affect critical business processes.

Nagios provides many benefits, including:

Comprehensive IT Infrastructure Monitoring: Provides monitoring of all mission-critical infrastructure components – including applications, services, operating systems, network protocols, systems metrics, and network infrastructure. Hundreds of third-party addons provide for monitoring of virtually all in-house applications, services, and systems.

Visibility: Provides a central view of your entire IT operations network and business processes. Powerful dashboards provide at-a-glance access to powerful monitoring information and third-party data. Views provide users with quick access to the information they find most useful.

Awareness: Alerts are sent to IT staff, business stakeholders, and end users via email or mobile text messages, providing them with outage details so they can start resolving issues immediately.

Proactive Planning: Automated, integrated trending and capacity planning graphs allow organizations to plan for infrastructure upgrades before outdated systems catch them by surprise.

Customisability: A powerful GUI provides for customization of layout, design, and preferences on a per-user basis, giving your customers and team members the flexibility they want.

Ease of Use: Integrated web-based configuration interface lets admins hand out control of managing monitoring configuration, system settings, and more to end users and team members easily. Configuration wizards guide users through the process of monitoring new devices, services, and applications – all without having to understand complex monitoring concepts.

Multi-Tenant Capabilities: Multi-user access to web interface allows stakeholders to view relevant infrastructure status. User-specific views ensures clients only see the infrastructure components they're authorized for. Advanced user management simplifies administration by allowing you to mange user accounts easily. Provision new user accounts with a few clicks and users automatically receive an email with their login credentials.

Extendable Architecture: Multiple APIs provide for simple integration with in-house and third-party applications. Hundreds of community-developed add-ons extend monitoring and native alerting functionality. Custom interface and add-on development is available to tailor Nagios XI to meet your organisation's exact needs.