Keynote Systems Integrates With Nagios

Keynote Systems has introduced a new product to give companies using the Nagios open-source monitoring tool an end-to-end view of server, infrastructure and applications performance. The Keynote Enterprise Adaptor 2.0 with Nagios integration lets IT and Web operations teams monitor performance from the service and end-user perspective.

Nagios is an open-source computer and network monitoring application that watches hosts, network services and some applications. The software alerts administrators when things go wrong and informs them again when things improve. It also provides a historical record of outages, events, notifications, and alert response for later review. Nagios' popularity continues to grow. Keynote estimates that Nagios has more than 250,000 users in IT operations, says Vik Chaudhary, Keynote's VP of product management and corporate development.

But Nagios can't glean performance and other monitoring metrics from outside an organization's firewall - and thus can't give a more comprehensive view of service levels. Keynote can provide greater insight and more details about various Web sites and external sources that are part of the greater ecosystem in which a company IT operates, and to correlate infrastructure performance with end-to-end services relative to the end-user's experience.

Keynote has released an adapter, which is available either as software or as a network appliance, that integrates with Nagios 3 so that operations teams can combine Keynote's performance and availability alerts into the open-source monitoring solution. Keynote already offers adapters for a variety of enterprise systems management platforms, Including CA NSM, HP Operations Manager, IBM Tivoli Software, Microsoft SCOM, BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management Software, dynaTrace, OPNET APM Software, and Quest Foglight.
 
The adaptor polls Keynote's Alarm Server (hosted in a Keynote data center), which culls data from the Keynote Global Test and Measurement Network, and then pulls that information back into the adaptor's log file, so it can be consumed by Nagios, says Robert Hughes, Keynote's, director of global services and solution consulting.

Keynote's service generates synthetic tests from more than 3,000 measurement computers and mobile devices in over 240 locations in 160 metropolitan areas around the world; these tests monitor performance across the Internet and into a client's environment. The service is designed to watch mobile and Internet content, applications, and services as end users see them.

With the Enterprise Adapter 2.0, Keynote enables IT operations teams to display Web and mobile application performance and availability alerts on a single console as well as pinpoint and troubleshoot performance availability problems for online Web and mobile applications on both sides of the firewall. That means, for example, that Nagios can now provide an IT operations team with the ability to uncover a problem that Keynote found - such as an SSL problem within a Web server authentication program - that is blocking customers from accessing an application in an Internet portal. The services, servers and applications Nagios traditionally monitors wouldn't have been able to capture the issue.

The Nagios integration is useful, but Nagios is still a relatively low-end, albeit fairly pervasive performance tool, says Dennis Drogseth, VP with Enterprise Management Associates. The bigger story, he says, is "Keynote is developing a high-quality adapter to expose its data sets to a wide variety of potential monitoring solutions - so that their customers can get a more cohesive view of what's going on both inside of the data center, and outside the firewalls."