The image of sentinels has been with us since antiquity. Their presence is a reminder of times when safety was of primary importance. When it came time to branding and naming, it seemed only natural for ETI-NET to call its advanced management product Sentinel, whose primary purpose is monitoring and managing NonStop systems. The inspiration for this name came from familiarity with Roman history, where the role of Sentinels was about military guards whose job it was to stand, keep watch, and take appropriate action.
In the complex world of hybrid IT, where hardware, software, networks, and storage all come together, weaving a mesh of different technologies, the landscape this creates can only be described as hostile and the target of unscrupulous individuals. Having Sentinel keeping watch made good business sense to ETI-NET.
However, they are not the only concern of IT operations. A more basic concern is the day-to-day performance of the systems and solutions that IT operations are charged with overseeing. Simply having an understanding of the complete environment has proved just as demanding as tracking hostilities.
To better serve the hybrid IT world and the HPE NonStop systems that can be found as participants, ETI-NET provides this advanced monitoring with Sentinel: one designed to be a dynamic operations and service management solution.
Sentinel for HPE NonStop is unique in that it is not only a highly modernized software solution featuring much that draws heavily on open and industry-standard components and has been doing so for a very long time. It is this longevity in the marketplace, together with its low impact / light footprint, that has caught the attention of the HPE NonStop community.
Having provided monitoring and management insights for as long as it has helped to reinforce the stability of the product and the presence of industry knowledge applied to addressing typical operational concerns any HPE NonStop customer might experience.
Without a doubt, the most important aspects of Sentinel can be seen with the latest release, which is now shipping.
With the latest release, Sentinel extends NonStop management to introduce the concept of historical NonStop data management through the newly architected Data Storage Service (SDS) option. SDS allows NonStop operations to store historical metrics, including CPU, processes, and disk metrics, which operators can call upon via Grafana-powered dashboards to deliver customizable reports. With minimal NonStop impact, CPU metrics can be polled up to every 5 seconds, enabling users to continuously improve digital resilience.
It is with the SDS database and Grafana presentation layer that Sentinel can now make sense of substantial amounts of data collected across any timeframe from just a few hours to where it is addressing data collected over the years. This gives operators the capability to query, visualize, alert on, and, in fact, allow the exploration of metrics, logs, and even traces that separate today’s modern Sentinel from competing product offerings.
“There has been a history of monitoring and management products available to the NonStop community, each of which has had its own take on the priority NonStop operations staff value most. But when you consider how Sentinel has continued to evolve with the many changes that have occurred with NonStop, it’s not surprising to read of just how valuable Sentinel has proved to be to those NonStop customers that rely on it for its oversight,” said Mike Mitsch, ETI-NET Director, Business Development. “The latest release of Sentinel proves to be a heavyweight contender to any monitoring product in the NonStop landscape and we are ready to go head-to-head. With these enhancements our clients have confirmed that ETI-NET has raised the bar in terms of NonStop monitoring modernization. We are more relevant today in terms of functionality and affordability compared to any product offering addressing this market.”
How does this come about, and what are the key benefits of running Sentinel today? It is hard to overlook how Sentinel retrieves performance and capacity statistics in addition to alerts and alarms coming from these same subsystems and applications and analyses them against preconfigured thresholds, all in real-time.
When it detects an anomaly that warrants further attention, it creates a log message that is submitted to the NonStop EMS system and, in so doing, capitalizes on the presence of EMS. Where this benefits the NonStop customer is how automatic corrections can be initiated even as the dashboards become engaged and display varying degrees of concern through the graphical interface.
Monitoring, analysis, insights, detection and display are all key elements of Sentinel. It will only get better as the work already done with the addition of Grafana working with historical data analysis will gradually find its way into support for all dashboards and visualization capabilities. “Listening to our clients and implementing the functionality they demand is just good business sense to ETI-NET. We are pleased to make these investments to further differentiate Sentinel from all other competitors on NonStop,” added Mike Mitsch.
Built over decades of proven customer success and feedback, Sentinel for HPE NonStop provides a world-class system monitoring capability for mission-critical operations. Isn’t it time you turned you attention to the deployment of a solution that has been designed to provide monitoring that enterprises everywhere depend on to perform their tasks without interruption?
Learn more at https://etinet.com/products/sentinel-nonstop-monitoring/
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