blackbox cloud : monitoring and automation driven IT management
blackbox cloud is a powerful "analytics and automation as a service" unifying platform, designed especially for the monitoring, the trending, event and incident management, prediction, testing and experiments, and more generally for data driven activities.
blackbox cloud relies on the fdmon monitoring solution (Fast Deployment Monitoring). The name "blackbox cloud", evokes its first function consisting in recording securely all operational data related to monitored infrastructures, networks, applications or services. fdmon will remain the "technical name" of the research and development project.
Historically, fdmon has been designed to address Business Critical needs (24/7 infrastructures and services monitoring without interruption).
blackbox cloud, hosted on the fdmon worldwide multi-cloud infrastructure, provides an availability of 100% from end to end, thanks to the geo-clustered implementation of all components (Analytics, Web, Time Series/Trending, Proxy, Notifications) and a "Proxy Failover" mechanism implemented on clients sites.
The following diagram shows a zero-downtime implementation built from 8 fdmon nodes on the cloud and 2 Proxy Servers :
blackbox cloud being natively designed for geo-clustering, the only bottleneck is the latency between fdmon nodes, that is compensated by a high parallelization of interactions with data and metrics.
Onboarding your data-centers or cloud infrastructures in blackbox cloud requires a few minutes only. Then, activating the monitoring of all your infrastructure components or applications is immediate and managed from the blackbox cloud centralized user interface.
Scalability of your blackbox cloud environment is infinite : the extreme modularity of fdmon allows to build large monitoring platforms capable to monitor, from a unique interface, an infinite number of data-centers and infrastructure components or applications.
Evolutivity of blackbox cloud is infinite : blackbox cloud can monitor everything and will be able to monitor everything in the future whatever the technology, thanks to the blackbox analytics studio. The user can implement by himself new technologies. Furthermore, blackbox cloud is IOT ready thanks to its MQTT broker and its MQTT collector.
Traffic between your data-centers and blackbox cloud is secured, deduplicated and compressed. Bandwidth required between your data-centers and blackbox cloud is absolutely negligible (1 MB/s for 20'000 servers/equipments and 50'000'000 metrics updated every minute).
To allow the traffic between your data-centers and blackbox cloud, you just need to authorize HTTPS connections from your fdmon Proxies to blackbox cloud IP addresses. By design, blackbox cloud doesn’t generate any incoming traffic, even during interactions with IT infrastructure components from the blackbox cloud user interface.
blackbox cloud allows you to design your own centralized monitoring and IT management portal from unlimited dashboard trees.
Your blackbox cloud environment is fully customizable (including Analytics code and charts aspect) allowing creation of high level and business oriented dashboards trees (executive) as well as deep monitoring technical dashboards trees (for operational, research or support teams). Triggers to interact with IT components (from simple operations or complex workflows) can be configured on dashboards directly.
The blackbox cloud SLA Monitoring allows you to monitor trends regarding SLA compliance and predict any SLA breach.
blackbox cloud provides reports on components availability, stability, capacity, events, problems, logs, incidents resolutions, interactions, SLA compliance, ...
Thanks to the "Time Cursor" feature, you can replay events of the past as a part of post-mortem analysis (black box concept).
To monitor your infrastructures or services with blackbox cloud, you don't need to deploy any agent. You need only to deploy a fdmon Proxy that will be in charge of collecting all metrics of your infrastructure components and applications.
blackbox cloud is 100% agentless, whatever the monitored technology (Windows, Unix, VMware, KVM, Kubernetes, HP, IBM, Oracle, SQL Server, Informix, Dell/EMC, Hitachi, Nutanix, Cisco, Palo-Alto, ...)
The blackbox cloud user interface is ultra-optimized and ultra-ergonomic (0% Java, 0% Flash, no plugin, no cookie, 100 % HTML/JavaScript).
Historically, ergonomy and user interface quickness have been the first items of the specifications of fdmon.
Your blackbox cloud environment is totally open : you can connect whatever you want to it (ITSM solution, business metrics, ...).
Furthermore, you can modify, improve, or rewrite the way to monitor your IT infrastructures or applications by yourself thanks to the blackbox Analytics Studio. blackbox cloud resources monitoring scripts are totally open.
For the currently supported technologies, blackbox cloud is able to detect any kind of infrastructure bottleneck and any change on monitored components (kernel parameter, device or object property, package version, process starting time, ...) and to correlate it with any event or metric trend.
blackbox cloud is able to extrapolate any trend and predict any lack of resource or any threshold crossing, in short, medium or long term, by choosing the most appropriate analysis periods.
blackbox cloud provides a centralized logs management with deduplication and smart filtering, allowing the check of million logs in a few minutes (application and infrastructure logs). A hashing mechanism, applied on the "generic" format of each log received, allows blackbox cloud to detect unusual logs.
You can query the fdmon Smart Inventory (real-time in-memory database of metrics and attributes) about any attribute for a CI, a group of CIs, a site or your overall IT ecosystem. Examples : what is the most active disk device or process (and the related server) in terms of IO size (sequential IOs) ? what is the sum of the free space of all files systems ? what are all versions of python installed in your IT ecosystem ? what are all values of a given Oracle parameter, for all Production Oracle instances ? What is the highest uptime ? etc ...
You can interact securely with any monitored component from the blackbox cloud user interface thanks to a set of "primitives" defined for each monitored technology on Proxy Servers (examples : obtaining logs of a specific backup session or restarting a backup, provisioning a new virtual server or workload, stopping, starting or deleting a workload, provisioning, extending or deleting a storage volume, installing a package, applying a patch, etc ...)
All interactions are defined beforehands, controlled and traced. After setting access control policies, managing your IT infrastructures from blackbox cloud does not require giving credentials to IT administrators. Hostnames and IP addresses can be anonymized for specific user categories.
blackbox cloud makes your IT administration more secure, and provides a full traceability of all interactions.
Automated interactions allow blackbox cloud to fix problems automatically and implement autonomous data-centers. Complex workflows (primitives chaining with dependencies) can be scheduled, triggered by user or automatically triggered by events.
Interactions or workflows can be subject to validation from your ITSM tool as a part of your change management process.
User interactions widgets can be placed anywhere on the backbox cloud user interface. An usual application of these feature consists in implementing your own cloud interface whatever the technology behind (with multiple cloud providers), to unify monitoring and IT administration on the same user interface. The fdmon Ansible collector allows you to run your own Ansible playbooks from the blackbox cloud user interface.
Thanks to the External Monitoring Collectors, you can consolidate on your blackbox cloud monitoring portal, your different on-premise monitoring platforms built from VMware vRrealize Operations (vROPs), Nagios, Centreon, XY-Mon, SCOM, etc ... in a few minutes.
These specific collectors, that run on your fdmon Proxy Servers, act as gateways between most popular monitoring solutions of the market and blackbox cloud. You retrieve all monitored resources on the blackbox cloud repository and can organize them like any other resource monitored directly by blackbox cloud.
Partners or customers can get a dedicated blackbox cloud platform (on a their private cloud or on-premises), according to their geographic or legal constraints, with the same guarantees, in terms of availability, as the worldwide public platform.
For more information : contact@ncor-labs.ch