VitalQIP Product Description
Additional Product Features
4.1.1
VitalQIP Services Manager Module
Services Manager is an application that allows the user to monitor and control the status of defined
system services, such as DHCP, DNS, and more. This module is developed to work with VitalQIP where
it is deployed on traditional Servers, not appliances. As was mentioned previously, an appliance based
solution incorporates monitoring of services via the Appliance Management Station. Services Manager
provides monitoring and reporting on the activity of the various DDNS and DHCP servers. Each service
running on a server can be monitored and stopped and started by an authorized administrator.
With the remote server there are service manager agents or probes, which report to the Services Manager
system. These agents can respond to requests from Services Manager an either report on processes or
stop/start them.
The central system is NT or Unix based with agents running on all platforms supported by VitalQIP. At
any moment the status of a particular service can be seen as well as its statistics. For example the number
of DNS resolves or the lease count by subnet for a DHCP server. As these statistics are accumulated they
are reported on a poll interval and placed in a history file for reference and planning purposes. It can be
used for determining server placements and load balancing. Any status change can result in an alert for
example like a DNS process or the message service process. Alerts are handled through Services Manager
Director (Central system) and are e-mail based. These e-mails can be linked to pagers and specific
messages sent. Alerts can also be generated from the probe function. This unique function provides the
ability to specifically send a request from a remote agent to a remote server across the network and verify
that the response is as expected. Agents can reside both on the servers and any NT or UNIX supported
platform.
There are three major architectural components to Services Manager.
•
The Services Manager Interface
•
The Agents
•
The Director
The Services Manager Interface is the Windows graphical user interface (GUI) that you will use to
manage the servers and services on both UNIX and Windows platforms. Through the interface, you can
define the services for servers, start/stop services, and gather statistics on services.
The Agents also reside on either a UNIX or Windows system and handle the communication to the
servers and services. The Agent Manager does the installation of agents automatically based on the
identification of new services. You can install any number of Agent Managers on your network, but only
one Agent Manager per system.
The Director is the engine that processes, stores, and directs the information regarding servers and
services from the Agent Manager to the Interface. There is only ever one Director, and it can reside on
either a UNIX or a Windows system.
A View
is a visual hierarchy of servers and services. There are two types of views in Services Manager. A
Services Manager administrator must first set up the Director View, which then enables the Services
Manager administrator or other network administrators to set up the Operating Views. The Director View
is the hierarchical view that encompasses all servers and services on the network. The Director View is
the whole "pie" of servers and services that you plan to manage using Services Manager
Copyright
©
2009 Alcatel-Lucent
Page 42
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