This release marks the culmination of several releases to better integrate Hyperic into VMware’s overall vFabric Suite. The new version delivers plugins to monitor and manage other VMware vFabric products such as tc Server 2.7, Web Server 5.1, and GemFire 6.6.2 and Gemfire 7 (vFabric Hyperic only). It also contains a major change for current users to change the backend database to standardize on PostgreSQL, a VMware supported project. Embedded with vFabric Postgres 9.1, or vPostgres, vFabric Hyperic 5.0 can now also be installed as an appliance. For users who wish to use the open source version of PostgreSQL, it can also be installed and attached to the Hyperic application independently. For more information on this move to vPostgres, please see the post from last week by long time Hyperic engineer, Scott Feldstein on Why Hyperic is Going to Support PostgreSQL Only As a Backend Database.

vFabric Hyperic and Hyperic HQ Open Source are both available for immediate download. For more information, including the complete list of product improvements and bug fixes, check the [release notes] or the documentation.

Currently, Hyperic has over 120 plugins that either come with the distribution or are available on the HyperFORGE. VMware also recently announced a new Cloud Application Management Marketplace BETA, where plugins that work for any VMware Application Management product including Hyperic, APM, Application Director or Spring Insight can be downloaded.

Today, an original Hyperic engineer, Scott Feldstein, publishes a training session recording delivered to internal VMware employees earlier this summer. The tutorial teaches Hyperic administrators and developers how to develop java plugins. In this detailed one hour tutorial, Feldstein covers:

• The anatomy of a plugin
• Authoring a plugin
• Reviews example plugins such as the MySQL plugin
• Plugin deployment
• Plugin testing

With Hyperic, chances are, something is wrong and it has to do with JVM timekeeping getting out of sync between the Hyperic Server and Agent. If both the server and agent have different timestamps, an event known as time drift, then even if the agent is reporting everything fine, it may not be reporting with a time that the server thinks is acceptable. This, in turn, causes the server to report an outage.

There is a secondary performance impact as well, as the system will also incur additional overhead in re- scheduling measurements for both the agent and the database repository as it tries to backfill (inserting of the late metrics) and correctly insert these elements into the database.

How Time Works in Software

Time is kept in a number of ways depending on hardware, operating system, and sub-systems like virtual machines or JVMs. Time drift occurs as the system time becomes separated from the JVM time. For Hyperic, its important to remember that Hyperic HQ is an agent based monitoring solution. So we have a server on one machine that keeps time separately from the agent that we need to keep in sync so agent reports are not reported “missing”, and cause false alerts.

Agents are usually the cause of the time drift as they run as Java Virtual Machine (JVM) processes. There are two components to JVM timekeeping, the platform system time and also the JVM internal clock.

System Time

System time usually comes from a physical hardware clock, whether built into your machine or as an external hardware device. Essentially, this clock ticks at a precise speed and then the system interrupts it after a number of ticks and clocks the time. The interrupt rate varies on operating systems and hardware, but the principal is the same. (For more info on how time is kept, the intro to VMware’s Timekeeping in VMware Virtual Machines VMware ESX 4.0/ESXi 4.0, VMware Workstation 7.0 provides a detailed primer.)

JVM Internal Clock

For processes running in Java Virtual Machines, the JVM needs to provide a clock the same as if it was a physical machine. While lots of sophisticated engineering has gone into making this as perfectly synched as possible, the reality is a JVM relies on software, not hardware to keep time. System pressures, such as CPU slowdowns due to temperature changes or loads, can affect time in a JVM. So, it is essential to constantly check these times, and realign them.

Best Practices for Synchronizing Time

On both physical and virtual platforms the HQ Server and HQ Agents system times should be closely synchronized with use of a mechanism such as NTP or against a domain controller. For VMware virtualized systems, it is recommended to review section “3.4 VM Timekeeping Best Practices” in Enterprise Java Applications on VMware Best Practices Guide.

When the agent JVM process starts up, it obtains an initial base time from the operating system scheduler clock. Restarting agents will reset the time back to system time and resynchronize the agent with the server as long as system times are in sync.

Ideally the times on agents and the server will be synchronized to within a sub-second to 5 seconds difference time offset. Time differences greater than 30 seconds should be corrected to bring them back to close synchronization.

A restart of the Agent process (JVM) will permit the agent to synchronize to the time referenced system clock and will return server and agents back into a synchronized state.

It is a recommended best practice to configure a centralized time source to synchronize platform times. This may need to be coordinated to address worldwide time zone configuration for a globally distributed enterprise with centralized monitoring.

Troubleshooting Time Sync Issues

The Hyperic UI Administration and Health Tabs and the HQ Health Report are effective means to check agent time offsets on demand. To review the Agent time synchronization in the HQ Administration go to Administration Tab –> HQ Health Agents –> Time Offset.

Here you will see what agents have significant time offsets. To fix them quickly, an agent restart is recommended. To prevent drift from causing errors, it is recommended to first employ a method to correct time drift either using NTP or a domain controller. However, since that is not a perfect method, it is also recommended to set up alerts on the time drift itself.

Essentially, it is recommended to set up an alert that will notify when the Agent time sync value exceeds a pre-determined value appropriate for the environment.

If the agent time synchronization cannot be maintained, it is possible to restore synchronization by restarting the agent process. This may be a manual intervention to restart the agent. This may also be accomplished by associating a control action or script action to the alert, and the action will initiate a restart of the agent.

Additional Reading

VMware has some must read articles on timekeeping that should be on every system administrators reading list. This is not just a virtualization issue, it affects hardware platforms as well and may propagate up through virtualization layers.

Enterprise Java Applications on VMware Best Practices Guide
Timekeeping in VMware Virtual Machines VMware ESX 4.0/ESXi 4.0, VMware Workstation 7.0
Best practices for running Java in a virtual machine (KB article 1008480)
Time in virtual machine drifts due to hardware timer drift (KB article 1006072)
Timekeeping best practices for linux (KB article 1006427)
Time in a Linux guest operating system runs faster than real time due to lost tick overcompensation (KB article 1006113)
Time runs too fast in a Windows virtual machine when Multimedia Timer interface is used (KB article 1005953)

Major enhancements for the new version include better support for vFabric products, including new plugins for tc Server 2.7, Web Server 5.1, and GemFire 6.6.2 (available only in vFabric Hyperic, which will be available from VMware later this year). The new version also includes many hard-to-see new improvements such as bug fixes, and improved performance and scalability.

While Hyperic remains an independent web and middleware infrastructure monitoring solution, significant effort has also been put into this release to increase its functionality while working in VMware vFabric Application Performance Management (APM) suite. For Hyperic users that are interested in trying out the next generation application management suite designed for cloud-based applications, the APM Beta is still open to Hyperic customers.

Just as a reminder, this is an early beta of the Hyperic HQ 5.0 release, and is not meant for production environments. Users are welcome to put the product through its paces and provide feedback on any bugs into the Hyperic Bugs Forum.

Editors Note: This post has been updated to clarify the new vFabric plugins will only be available in vFabric Hyperic and not the open source version.

Attend this webcast and learn how to:

• Extend the benefits of virtualization, automated provisioning and predictive monitoring to the application layer
• Configure and deploy applications on top of this ready-made infrastructure

Featured Speaker:
Chris DeLashmutt, Senior Systems Engineer, VMware

Register for this Webinar here

Alerts go off…

And, developers begin to scratch their head while uncovering the root cause…

This situation is exactly what vFabric Application Performance Manager (APM) was designed to help with.

While readers of this blog probably know vFabric Hyperic is a) part of APM and b) helps with middleware and OS monitoring, vFabric AppInsight is the second component within APM and provides transaction and code-level monitoring (byte code instrumentation is via Spring Insight).  With Hyperic and AppInsight, teams gain an early warning system for performance problems as well as helping on Root Cause Analysis (RCA).  This post explains how Hyperic and AppInsight work together to speed the remediation process.

Peering into Production Problems

As with any production issue, the problem could be caused by multiple things (e.g. the network, code, middleware, applications, components, hardware) and across different tiers of the architecture.  Triaging and troubleshooting takes time, there is usually pressure to resolve quickly, and it typically impacts employees or customers.

With APM, multiple metrics from various sources (middleware, network, and code) are pulled together into a correlated view to help with RCA and mean time to resolution (MTTR).

Monitoring An Example App with APM

Using the 3-tier Konakart application as an example, we can see the following:

• App performance is good – app objects are healthy and green
• Key metrics like Error Percent, Hit rate, and Average Latency are good.

Monitoring Changes due to a Performance Issue

If we simulate a problematic configuration change, the app’s behavior changes:

• Hit rate declines rapidly, Average hit rate starts to decline from 204 to 141
• The Usage KPI turns red, which is being propagated to the Application KPI which turns yellow.
• Change notification is displayed in the Key Metrics over time graph, a clear indication that a configuration change related to JVM memory has been made. In fact, this change event is caught by Hyperic and seamlessly presented in AppInsight.

Digging into Root Cause

Now that the JVM memory issues have been identified, we can add some additional metrics to the Key Metrics over time graph. By pressing the Customize button, we can add metrics for Heap Memory Free and Heap Memory Used from the Middleware section of available metrics.  Now, we can compare:

• Hit Rate dropped from 224 to 0
• Free Heap Memory plunged from 120.5 MB to .2 MB

Before and After the Configuration Change

All transactions fail and heap memory changed drastically.  Looking at the before and after comparison, both Free and Used memory went down.

Hmmm…perhaps the JVM heap size configuration was changed?  The setenv.sh file shows the mistaken configuration of 24MB not 1024MB of memory.  By reverting back to 1024MB, the issue is fixed, and the Konakart application becomes green again.

With APM, we can quickly see when the problem began, identify high level metrics related to the problem, dig further into specific detail, and have the related information in one view to help assess root cause.

While it seems like a natural thing for us to do, its not until I see posts like I did this week that I am reminded too many people think of using Hyperic for only production web infrastructure. The post I am talking about is from Dimitar Dimitrov, a QA engineer who works with Experian Decision Analytics. As one of the speakers for the Innovation in Software Test Automation conference that will occur later this year in Sofia, Bulgaria, Dimitrov  wrote a great blog post explaining how Experian uses Hyperic for Quality Assurance.  If you are unfamiliar with Experian, they are a global information services company providing solutions for credit, risk, fraud, marketing, and decision-making across 80 countries. They are probably best known at the consumer level for giving you your credit score.

In the article, Dimitrov explains how he was looking to collect information about a multi-platform system for benchmarking and how Hyperic was implemented. His post is really thorough and explains a lot about how he implemented Hyperic, but specifically I’d like to call out Dimitrov’s list of the top 7 reasons why Hyperic should be used for QA:

1. It allows you to auto-discover and instrument your test environment in a consistent and easy to use form
2.  It supports respectable number of operating systems and huge amount of servers, platforms, protocols, etc.
3. It allows you to monitor run-time parameters and events
4. It allows you to control the state and configuration test environment
5. It collects and stores information about your test environment in a centralized repository
6. It provides you with user-friendly interface for interactive reviewing of results and report generation
7. It allows extension of the monitoring and management capabilities of the agents and presentation capabilities of the web portal through development of custom plug-ins

Dimitar’s entire article on his use of Hyperic for Quality Assurance is here

The new version includes support for mod_bmx, a new Apache HTTPD module created by the Hyperic engineering team that provides detailed internal runtime information to monitoring applications such as Hyperic. Hyperic 4.6.6 is the first monitoring tool that is ready to monitor the health of vFabric Web Server, VMware’s commercial version of the popular Apache Web Server, by running HTTP queries to gather metrics and configuration information. Additionally, with the release of vFabric Suite 5.1, vFabric Web Server instances are automatically configured with the mod_bmx module so that monitoring applications, such as Hyperic, can gather status and metric information about the instance. For more information, see the vFabric Web Server documentation on how to Configure BMX for Monitoring vFabric Web Server Instances.

For open source users, this is an upgrade from version 4.6.0 and users should read the release notes for versions 4.6.5 as well as 4.6.6.

You can download Hyperic 4.6.6 here.

The mod_bmx module is open source and hosted on Github at https://github.com/hyperic/mod_bmx.

About APM

For those not familiar with this product, APM is the next generation management tool designed specifically for applications running on cloud infrastructure. For apps running in the cloud and at scale, it is not enough (and sometimes not feasible) to count on monitoring the web infrastructure alone. Application owners need deeper visibility into how transactions are running, how code is performing and need to constantly update the managed inventory to keep up with dynamically scaling applications. Built by VMware, APM is this tool that provides application owners with the ease-of-use and deep visibility they need to manage applications at cloud-scale.

Delivered as a suite, APM consists of AppInsight, the main application that shares powerful visualizations of application health by sampling real transactions to provide a perspective of how users are experiencing the application. Combined in the suite with Hyperic for web infrastructure monitoring, and Spring Insight for code level monitoring of Java applications, this new suite gives application administrators an advantage over traditional monitoring while operating in the cloud. For more on APM, see the product pages or download the datasheet.

Beta Program Requirements

• Existing VMware customer, not yet using APM
• Active involvement to deploy, test and provide feedback on APM usage, performance and reliability during July-October 2012.
• Must be willing to publicly discuss experiences as applicable, including supporting media quotes and customer references.

VMware is accepting beta program candidates that meet the above profile, however in addition, we are interested in customers to specifically test the following features under development:

• A Hyperic install and deployment through a Virtual Appliance
• New support for Microsoft SQL Server 2012 in the updated Microsoft SQL Server plugin
• New support for PostgreSQL Server 9.x in the updated PostgreSQL Server plugin

To Apply

To apply, please contact your VMware representative, (and if applicable let your representative know you are interested in testing the features identified above) and they will submit your account for consideration in the beta program.

Editors note: This program will be running through October 2012. Please ask your sales representative if there is still space for you to join!

Support for Apache Tomcat 7

Tomcat 7 is gaining adoption in the marketplace, including with enterprise users. To support this, the latest release for Hyperic adds support for Apache Tomcat 7, the latest stable release published by the Apache Software Foundation.

Improve Performance for Hyperic’s Internal Tomcat Server on Large Implementations

The Hyperic server configuration properties have been expanded to better manage the how many threads are available to the Hyperic Server’s internal Tomcatserver. Two new properties have been established tomcat.maxthreads and tomcat.minsparethreads, whose default values in Hyperic HQ are 500 and 50, respectively. Default values are set for deployments under fifty platforms. If your deployment is larger than that, guidance is outlined in the Hyperic documentation to help you tune your internal Hyperic server. See “Scaling and Tuning Hyperic Performance” in vFabric Hyperic Installation and Configuration for more about tomcat.maxthreads, tomcat.minsparethreads, and other server properties you can use to tune the Hyperic Server in large environments.

Detailed Configuration History Tracking For Tomcat

Hyperic 4.6.5 introduces new support for detailed configuration tracking. Previously, Hyperic would identify only be able to identify that a file had been changed. While it would identify the specific file, it was then up to administrators to investigate where the change occurred in the file manually. Now, Hyperic will identify the type of change including “add”, “delete”, “modify”, or “rename” to a file and also specify the actual changes in text files, saving administrators additional steps while troubleshooting problems. This functionality has been implemented initially in only a few of the most popular web infrastructure software, starting with Apache Tomcat and also including others such as Apache, WebSphere, WebLogicServer, JBoss, PostgreSQL, mySQL, and Oracle. For more information on how to use this new configuration tracking, Hyperic documentation, see “Log and Configuration Event Tracking” in vFabric Hyperic Overview for more about the configuration tracking functionality, and see “FileChangeTrackPlugin” in vFabric Hyperic Plug-inDevelopment for more about the new support class.

For more information on this release, please see the release notes or check out the documentation. Note: Hyperic documentation has moved, old versions can be found at support.hyperic.com, while new versions have moved to the vFabric 5 Documentation Center.

Gayor further describes Application Director and its key concepts as:

The key purpose for Application Director is to automate the provisioning of infrastructure and applications so it happens faster, with fewer errors, and with less headache. If you’ve ever used a standard catalog of parts, you’ll get the idea immediately because Application Director stores information in a visual representation called a blueprint.  What’s in a blueprint? Basically, a blueprint includes everything you would use to build, configure, and deploy a server or group of servers to build out your application.  Blueprints define all the components like the operating system, virtual machine templates, web server, application server, database server, monitoring software, packaged software, EAR, SQL, or WAR, etc.  All these components are available to drag and drop onto your blueprint’s canvas from a standard catalog. Once the core building blocks are in place on your blueprint, you can further tailor your application build plan by including dependencies, policies, and configurations.

About the Demo

The SlideRocket demo illustrates three important parts of building an application using Application Director:

1. Building the blueprint is intuitive and quick using drag and drop capabilities.
2. Incorporating management capabilities, such as the vFabric Application Performance Manager (APM) agent takes just seconds using the pre-populated catalog service.
3. Deploying the blueprint to be provisioned on your target server is as fast as just one click.

To deploy another server,  just re-use the blueprint, add the new server, add any dependencies, and redeploy the improved application infrastructure.

About Application Performance Monitoring

VMware vFabric Application Performance Manager provides vFabric Hyperic customers with real-time visibility on their applications performance from a users point-of-view to help better manage SLAs in the cloud. Driven by VMware vFabric AppInsight, and fused with the metric data and control of vFabric Hyperic, you now have a next-generation application operations dashboard that automatically models transactions across all application tiers, providing a critical real-time perspective on the true performance of dynamically scaling applications.

Upgrade before June 30, 2012 to vFabric Application Performance Manager for just $99. See offer for more details.

Benefits are substantial for Hyperic users. As mentioned in a post earlier this year, they include:

• Single place to get help and collaborate on issues involving systems management, software development and virtualization.
• With over 1.2 million community members, including VMware product, support and field teams, this is the largest technology community leading the market on bringing the enterprise to the cloud.
• The largest resource knowledge base for VMware products, users can find sample code, SDKs, and APIs to help with all their development needs.

The new Hyperic VMware Community retains all of the former forum category organization, as well as the complete history of all announcements, messages and threads. Each thread from the former Forums will now be redirected to the new VMware Communities to aid in search or if users have bookmarked popular topics.

User history has been attached based on email address. If a user’s email address did not exist in the VMware Community, a new account was created for them and the user was notified to register now. All reward points have been transferred and users now gain credit under the VMware Communities rewards program.

Got questions? For questions on the migration, please check out the Hyperic VMware Communities Migration FAQ or, for general questions on how the VMware Communities work, see the VMware Communities FAQ.

Haven’t used the VMware Communities yet? All Hyperic users, including open source and enterprise users, are welcome to join. To join, go to the VMware Communities login and click Register.

On February 1^st, we will migrate the independent Hyperic Forums over to the overall VMware Communities.  All forums, messages, threads, announcements and reward points will be migrated over to a new Hyperic VMware Community. User history will be attached based on email address. If no user is found in the VMware Community, a new user will be created and an email will be sent to the user inviting them to join.

Once complete, this will offer Hyperic users a multitude of benefits including:

• Single place to get help and collaborate on issues involving systems management, software development and virtualization.
• With over 1.2 million community members, including VMware product, support and field teams, this is the largest technology community leading the market on bringing the enterprise to the cloud.
• The largest resource knowledge base for VMware products, users can find sample code, SDKs, and APIs to help with all their development needs.

The Hyperic Forums will be in read-only mode from February 1, 2012 for a few days, after which all content and discussions will be redirected and available on the VMware Communities. For more information on this migration, please see the Hyperic VMware Communities Migration FAQ.

Haven’t used the VMware Communities yet? All Hyperic users, including open source and enterprise users, are welcome to join. To join, go to the VMware Communities login and click Register.

• Login to Hyperic Forums
• Login to VMware Communities

These are two important milestones that completes the transition from our roots as an independent open source company and product into the dynamic and diverse world of true enterprise software lead by VMware. As former Hyperic CEO Javier Soltero pointed out in his original blog post on the acquisition:

“I’ve long argued that Hyperic’s vision of management software is aimed at helping people manage a newer, more complex, and more dynamic data center environment. For the last five years we have delivered that vision, including being one of the few management software products providing end‑to‑end support for virtualized application environments from the hardware to the virtualized service component. By joining forces with VMware, Hyperic will continue to fulfill this vision in lockstep with VMware’s ambitions to simplify IT and reduce operational expenses.”

It has been a busy two years, with tremendous results. With the announcement of VMware vFabric Application Performance Manager, Hyperic has been integrated as a cornerstone into VMware’s new cloud management strategy to help application owners living in the world of Infrastructure-as-a-Service to effectively manage their own SLAs. Easy-to-use and cloud-savvy, this new application performance management solution wraps in Hyperic to help accelerate and automate how application architects, developers and administrators manage applications across all layers of software and infrastructure.

Additionally, we are excited to announce that our customers experience will make the final transition to be part of the overall VMware Community. By early 2012, we will migrate the independent Hyperic Forums over to the overall VMware Communities.  Once complete, this will offer Hyperic users a single place to get all your questions answered about application management, software development and virtualization. With over 1.2 million community members, Hyperic users will have better access to meet online with peers to collaborate and solve problems, find sample code, SDKs, and APIs to help with all their development needs.

Special note for existing Hyperic Forums users:

While the migration is taking place, the Hyperic Forums will be in read-only mode for a few days, after which all content and discussions will be available on the VMware Communities. All existing Hyperic Forums users are encouraged to login and ensure that their email addresses are correct for this migration to take place. After the migration, your registered email will be notified of how to login to your new account. For more information on this migration, please see the Hyperic VMware Communities Migration FAQ .

Updated: Our IT maintenance window to perform this migration has shifted from early December 2011 to early 2012.

Cloud Foundry is the revolutionary open platform as a service from VMware that supports multiple frameworks, application services, and clouds. The vFabric Hyperic team is pleased to announce the availability of the free Cloud Foundry plugin for Hyperic that brings Hyperic’s proven ability to monitor, alert, and control application infrastructure resources to Cloud Foundry’s applications and services.

Overview and Features

Cloud Foundry’s VMC command line interface allows you to deploy and manage your applications running on CloudFoundry.com, but serious users require the automation and continuous monitoring capabilities from full-fledged management tools. Therefore, we have developed the Cloud Foundry plugin for Hyperic that utilizes the same APIs that VMC uses to talk to the Cloud Controller, and brings all of the information and capabilities into a dashboard GUI view while tracking metric data and events for historical purposes. The Hyperic plugin communicates with CloudFoundry.com remotely, so it’s easy to deploy into any existing Hyperic instances running in your data center. Some of the features include:

• Start an application
• Stop an application
• Restart an application
• Update reserved memory for an application
• Update the number of instances for an application
• Scale up an application by 1 instance
• Scale down an application by 1 instance

Benefits

Using Hyperic in conjunction with Cloud Foundry account gives you a lot of benefits and control. Here are just some of the benefits that you’ll get when using them together.

• Create alerts to notify or fix application runtime issues
• Visual dashboard view of health and configuration of all applications in Cloud Foundry whether or not they are running
• Review application deployment, availability, and resource consumption history
• On-demand, scheduled, or automated control actions to start, stop, restart, re-configure, or scale Cloud Foundry applications
• Track events when applications crash or change state
• Compare resource utilization against user quota
• …and many more

In addition, you can combine these metrics with other existing Hyperic services, such as HTTP or ping checks, to get an even more comprehensive view of what is happening with your running applications, including response time and availability (from the client perspective).

Installation and Configuration

The Cloud Foundry plugin for Hyperic is now available on HyperForge. Follow the Configuration Instructions section to download and install and configure the plugin on both Hyperic server and agent, and you’ll be monitoring your Cloud Foundry account in minutes.

Note that because the Cloud Foundry server is created manually, the Hyperic agent will not gather the user account properties very quickly after provisioning since it wasn’t auto-discovered. To expedite the properties discovery process, you may choose to restart the agent to kickstart the data gathering. You can start the agent remotely by navigating to the agent resource in the Hyperic UI, click on Views tab and then Agent Commands. Here you can select ‘restart’ to restart the Hyperic agent and have it report your Cloud Foundry user account info immediately.

Additional Information

Here are some additional source of information regarding this plugin:

• A screencast demonstrating how to create the Cloud Foundry resource, create alerts, and perform control actions
• If you are not yet a Cloud Foundry user, go sign up for an account on the current beta service at CloudFoundry.com
• If you are not familiar with Hyperic and would like to find out more, please go to vFabric Hyperic
• Hyperic HQ is the open source Hyperic and is fully compatible with the Cloud Foundry plugin, find out more about it at the Hyperic Community

Known for their hosting Zimbra and providing Hyperic monitoring for all their customers, managed hosting provider Contegix has tested the new appliance and has this to say of it:

“Contegix is committed to providing our customers with the best hosting services possible. The combination of Hyperic and Zimbra® Appliance increases our visibility into how customers are using email and collaboration. It enables us to increase our productivity and efficiency in managing this critical part of this infrastructure, while simultaneously helping our customers make smarter business decisions.” — Matthew Porter, CEO and co-founder of Contegix.

Key Benefits

• Flexible Alerting – Hyperic can alert Zimbra administrators within a minute of when the Zimbra application or any of its infrastructure starts to have a performance degradation, indicating a problem is about to occur. Hyperic alerts allows alert recipients to vary based on problem type, time of day and escalation workflows. They can also initiate control actions to self-heal established problems without administrators needing to intervene.
• Automated Control Actions – Hyperic control actions can automatically implement problem fixes, such as restarting a mail server.  When used for established problems or regular maintenance, this can reduce the number of off-hours issues that demand Zimbra administrator attention.
• Advanced Diagnostics – Zimbra administrators now have access to historical trending, log files, and a deep variety of performance indicators so they can have the insight into everything they need to know to quickly pinpoint the root cause of service problems, enabling them to restore service levels with a minimum impact on business productivity.

Pricing and Availability

Zimbra Appliance is currently available starting at USD $625 per 25 mailboxes for a perpetual license. Hyperic agents are now included on all Zimbra Appliances. For more information, visit:  www.vmware.com/products/zimbra

Hyperic is currently available in two editions: Hyperic HQ, the free, open source edition; and vFabric Hyperic, the commercial edition starting at $300 per Zimbra server per year.  For more information, visit http://www.vmware.com/products/springsource-hyperic/

For more information on this announcement, please see the ‘VMware Simplifies Monitoring of Zimbra Appliance with vFabric Hyperic’ press release here: http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/zimbra-hyperic.html

Thanks to all the users, community members and the entire Zimbra team for helping us to deliver this integrated appliance!

Building on previous releases for the Hyperic 4 family, this release is focused on updating the underlying infrastructure to a modern, lightweight, and modular architecture.  Taking advantage of the deep capabilities of both the Spring java application framework and Apache Tomcat servlet container, the Hyperic development team has improved performance and streamlined development time for future features and provided faster turnaround for bug fixes.

Switch from EJB to Spring 3.0

Originally developed using EJBs, this new Hyperic release upgrades the codebase to the Spring 3.0 Framework. Having direct access to many of the core Spring developers through SpringSource, a division of VMware, and the parent company of Hyperic, the development team recognized that the move to Spring 3.0 Framework would allow them to develop code that is more portable, reusable, testable and maintainable, ultimately providing Hyperic engineers and users with a simpler configuration, improved debugging and boosting overall quality.

As described by Hyperic co-founder and senior product manager, Charles Lee:

“We know from SpringSource surveys that 60% of Spring developers cite faster project completion and application quality as top reasons for using Spring. Our migration supports these assertions. By leveraging the Spring framework we have reduced Hyperic’s codebase by over 7% and dramatically decreased code complexity, which allows for faster startup times and more efficient development. “

In addition to migrating to Spring 3.0, the development team was able to modularize the code base and add Java 5 constructs.

Switch from JBoss to Apache Tomcat

For Hyperic, switching from JBoss to Apache Tomcat, went well beyond just another opportunity to continue to eat their own dog food. Although parent company SpringSource has a significant investment in the Apache Tomcat project, through their own commercial distribution of the software, vFabric tc Server, as well as the number of committers to the open source Apache Tomcat project employed by the company, Hyperic engineers were motivated to make the switch because of a move toward lean software development. Known as a lean and powerful web application server, over 70% of enterprise data centers rely Apache Tomcat for their application server because it is simpler to configure, easier to debug, and lowers code complexity which translates into faster development times—the goal for lean software development.

The Hyperic team first saw significant development time savings on server startup and shutdown. In a case study presented at the SpringOne G2X conference in October, Jennifer Hickey, Hyperic technical lead for the migration, described a clear example of development efficiencies achieved:

“We saw a significant improvement in developer productivity on the Hyperic product after the migration. For example a single developer coding and debugging an application saved 5 minutes of waiting to start up or shut down the application. Considering that developer may restart the application 12 times a day, that saves the developer one hour a day, which is a significant gain in development time.”

Move to Git and Apache Maven

Additional development processes were also updated.  The code repository was moved from subversion to git, and the build process moved from ant to Apache Maven. This lets Hyperic contributors take advantage of git’s distributed architecture, fast performance, and merge/branch capabilities. To download the source from the git code repository go to http://git.springsource.org/hq. Additionally, all of the Hyperic modules needed for development of custom plugins or features can now be downloaded from our maven repository at http://maven.hyperic.org/release.

Support for GemFire, RabbitMQ, and tc Server

The new release adds out-of-the-box support for three of the VMware vFabric platform services, including vFabric GemFire 6.5 distributed caching system, RabbitMQ enterprise messaging system, and the vFabric tc Server Java runtime server version 2.1 that was also released this week. Support for vFabric tc Server existed for previous releases of Hyperic; however, in 4.5 the plugin is now bundled in with all Hyperic distributions, and is no longer a separate download.

To find out more about the updates found in the open source Hyperic HQ 4.5 and the enterprise version vFabric Hyperic 4.5, please see the release notes.

Thanks again to all of our community members and customers that contributed feature ideas and bug reports to this release!

We’d like to thank Infoworld for selecting us, our users and customers for their support, our developer community for their contributions, and the hard-working Hyperic engineering, quality assurance, and customer support teams. We couldn’t have done this without you!

We have some more news coming down the track soon, so keep your eyes on this blog as well as to our Twitter stream.

As our CEO Paul Maritz mentioned at yesterday’s VMworld keynote, our industry has hit a tipping point where virtualization has surpassed the physical computing paradigm, due to a need for IT to quickly respond to dynamic business needs at ever-improving price points. To ensure even greater agility and value, the next destination for our industry is cloud computing. Making this shift requires a pragmatic, evolutionary approach that leverages investments in existing architecture.

Yesterday, Rod Johnson, SVP of VMware’s Cloud Application Platform Division, described how VMware vFabric is a key element of enabling our customers to reach this next destination of cloud computing. Delivering the agility and value promised by cloud computing requires a new kind of application — cloud applications — that have their own unique characteristics:

• Dynamic architectures
• Elastic capacity
• Extreme scalability
• Open choice

How do cloud applications change performance monitoring?

These characteristics of cloud applications bring new requirements to application performance monitoring. For instance, dynamic architectures and elastic capacity imply a datacenter defined by constant flux, with pools of hundreds, even thousands of VMs continually being started and stopped, vMotioned, reverted to snapshots, and so on.

This blistering rate of change is a natural outgrowth of responsiveness to business needs. But it is impossible to manage with manually maintained, complex configuration files used by legacy monitoring tools. The only way to get ahead of it is to use a monitoring product that can automatically discover changes to your entire application infrastructure — everything from the application code itself to the vSphere host. Hyperic Autodiscovery does exactly that, updating itself within moments of app infrastructure changes.

The extreme scalability required by cloud applications requires a lot of virtual machines – which leads to a firehose of performance data. For instance, a typical Hyperic customer will collect a million performance metrics per minute. It’s not at all hard to get to this volume of metrics, since we have a number of customers running 1000 (or more!) virtual machines, each with a Hyperic agent collecting about 1000 metrics. So, even though we’re not talking about Google-level scalability, application performance data become a performance problem in itself if not managed properly. Thankfully, Hyperic is engineered to handle high volumes of application performance data.

Open choice means that cloud applications can be built from a wide range of components. For instance, as Rod pointed out yesterday, cloud applications might use WebSphere, WebLogic, JBoss, and our own vFabric tc Server, as well as public cloud platforms, for their Java application server tier. It’s critical to have a monitoring tool that supports a range of popular web application technologies out of the box. But no one tool can support every conceivable technology. It’s understandable – there’s no way one vendor, no matter how innovative, can keep up with the thousands of other innovative companies in our industry. So in addition, it’s critical to have a monitoring tool that makes it easy to build custom monitoring plug-ins, and makes its built-in plugins open source to provide a wide range of code to reference and leverage. Hyperic delivers on this front, providing approximately 50,000 performance metrics for 75 web application technologies, as well as open source plugin code and a fully-supported plugin API that has been used by third parties to extend the range of technologies monitored by Hyperic.

What’s next for Hyperic?

We’re demonstrating vFabric Hyperic live at VMworld, in the main VMware booth. Come see for yourself how Hyperic adjusts to changes in virtual infrastructure in near real-time. Later this month, we’ll demonstrate Hyperic at Oracle Open World in San Francisco, September 19-23, and after that, we’ll be at Spring One 2GX in Chicago, October 19-22.

We’re committed to making Hyperic the leading choice for monitoring cloud applications, with their inherent dynamicism, scale, and openness, and we’re looking forward to working with you — our open source community, our users, and our customers — to make this happen.

What problems does Hyperic 4.4 solve?

The genesis of this release was that, as we listened to our customers and community, we were struck by two things. First, more and more of them are deploying their custom applications across virtual infrastructures. Second, virtualized app infrastructure is a game-changer that increases datacenter change by an order of magnitude. For instance, to scale app infrastructure up and down to accommodate rising and falling end-user demand, server VMs are continually spun up and powered down. Legacy monitoring tools that were not virtualization-aware could not keep up, and the operations teams that used them were left with serious infrastructure visibility gaps. It became clear that operations teams needed to equip themselves to prepare for a massive new level of datacenter dynamicism.

Hyperic 4.4 addresses this problem through the following new capabilities in Hyperic Enterprise:

Rapid Diagnosis of Virtualized Application Performance Problems: IT operations teams can now use Hyperic to rapidly pinpoint the cause of performance issues of applications running on virtualized infrastructure, by providing them with visibility into all application infrastructure layers, enabling them to determine whether the root cause of issues lies within an application, its guest operating system, or its ESX host. System administrators can easily compare performance data between an application and its corresponding virtual machine and ESX host via a new Hyperic user interface. This UI enables system administrators to reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) and increase mean time between failures (MTBF).

Automatic Maintenance of Application Infrastructure Inventory: Hyperic 4.4 automatically discovers ESX hosts, virtual machines, and guest operating systems within minutes of their launch, and presents them in a unified topology so users can see which application components are running on which ESX hosts. This eliminates reliance on chronically out-of-date configuration management databases (CMDBs). Additionally, Hyperic detects when virtual machines are moved from one ESX host to another using vMotion™, and adjusts topologies accordingly: no monitoring data is lost and there’s no need to recreate alerting workflows. This exceptional level of automation saves system administrators time and lets them manage more applications and servers than ever before.

Virtualization-Aware Alerting: Hyperic 4.4 can distinguish between when a guest operating system has shut down unintentionally, and when it has been intentionally powered down or suspended. This prevents false alarms and enables system administrators to elastically scale their application infrastructure without triggering alert storms.

Building on experience

Of course, Hyperic is no stranger to virtualized application infrastructure monitoring. In 2006, we delivered the industry’s first application performance monitoring for VMware ESX and GSX, and has long provided system administrators with the following capabilities, which remain in version 4.4:

Application Virtualization Migration Assurance: For IT teams running pilot projects to virtualize custom application workloads, Hyperic enables users to definitively quantify virtualization’s impact on application performance by baselining critical performance metrics for both physical and virtual infrastructure.

Automated Problem Resolution: Hyperic can automate common responses to application problems — such as reverting a virtual machine to a snapshot, restarting a virtual machine, and rebooting a guest operating system. These automated recovery actions help fulfill virtualization’s promise of greater operational efficiency, especially for companies with global customers who need to keep consumer-facing applications running 24/7.

Virtualized Environment Event & Log Monitoring: Hyperic’s event management features provide visibility into the log events reported for every virtual machine. Log events provide system awareness for performance data, configuration changes, and security action changes, such as when a virtual machine has been reverted to a snapshot. These events can be used to generate alerts, or simply to correlate errors reported in the VMware logs with performance and health indicators elsewhere in the environment.

Version 4.4 is Hyperic’s first major release as part of VMware. We’ve enjoyed the experience of working side-by-side with our new colleagues on the VMware vSphere team, leveraging their virtualization know-how and incredible development and testing infrastructure. We’re looking forward to continued collaboration to further deepen Hyperic’s virtualization capabilities.

Where to go from here

Check out our Hyperic 4.4 demo, download Hyperic Enterprise 4.4 or Hyperic Open Source 4.4, and dive into the new documentation on monitoring vSphere.

To be clear, the new vCenter integration is only in Hyperic Enterprise 4.4. That said, we’ve updated Hyperic Open Source 4.4 with a new version of the HQApi, and encourage you to check it out.

Please register for our upcoming Hyperic 4.4 webinar that explains the 10 pitfalls to avoid when monitoring a virtualized environment –  and how to avoid them, on Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 9 am Pacific / noon Eastern (other time zones).

Finally, we welcome your feedback. Let us know what you think in the comments below, Hyperic Forums (http://forums.hyperic.com/), or Twitter (we’re @hyperic).

These articles describe how virtualized environments are much more dynamic from legacy physical server farms, in that they enable new server instances to rapidly spun up and shut down, as well moved across physical hosts, in order to respond to surges in demand while maintaining high levels of availability and performance — and what that means for the sysadmins that need to keep everything running.

As for SpringSource Hyperic, we have some exciting news coming — so watch this space!

Hyperic Open Source 4.3 features include:

• SNMP version 3 — improved support for SNMP v3 authentication, plus SNMP v3 privacy services support.
• Extended Windows Event Logging — supports richer event logging for Win32

resources, so you can define more precise alert conditions to reduce alert volume.

• IBM WebSphere App Server – added WAS 7.0 support, removed WAS 5.0 support
• Oracle WebLogic Server – uses two-way SSL to communicate with WLS Administration Server
• IBM DB2 — now uses JDBC for management/monitoring, rather than DB2 API
• Zimbra – added support for Zimbra 4.5 through 6.0
• Hyperic API 3.1 with new functionality for managing control actions, logged events, alerts, SNMP, resources, groups, and Hyperic Server configurations.
• Over 140 bug fixes specific to Open Source Edition

Hyperic Enterprise 4.3 features include everything in the Open Source edition, plus:

• Improved Permissions Management, with simplified role definitions and new alert-related permissions.
• Enhanced support for SNMP version 3 — support for SNMP v3 View Access Control Model (VACM) and multiple variable bindings in SNMP notification escalation steps.
• Over 35 bug fixes specific to Enterprise Edition

Here is the Hyperic 4.3 download page. Enjoy!

Many thanks to all the users, customers, and engineers that contributed to this release.

You can get your paws on the bits here.

As always, a big thanks to the developers, quality assurance engineers, customers, and users that made this release possible.

Next, just a few weeks ago in August and barely 90 days into our SpringSource acquisition, we announced that SpringSource was itself being acquired by VMware (already arguably the next great enterprise software company).  In the process, Hyperic, SpringSource and VMware are defining a platform for computing that we all believe will revolutionize the way companies deploy and manage business applications and drive significant efficiencies for IT operators and developers.

Hyperic’s management software products are a key part of that vision.  We have heard from many journalists and analysts who greeted the announcement and vision with great interest not only because of the tremendous value of the Spring technologies, but also because of the potential this might have to the Hyperic management software products.

I wanted to use this rare blog post opportunity to outline key Hyperic principles that haven’t changed and we remain committed to.  If anything, recent news re-affirms them as we move towards both closing this acquisition and further integrating the teams.

Openness is the key to our continued success

Both Hyperic and SpringSource are companies built on open source technologies and strong communities. Our users’ ability to freely use, modify, and participate in the development of our products has been key to our success. In Hyperic’s case, the development of community supported plug-ins on our HyperForge, and most importantly the feedback that is provided by the passionate operations people who depend on our product is a key to our success. In addition to supporting our open source efforts, Hyperic is an open product that supports various different runtimes, platforms, and environments beyond those provided directly by us. By being inclusive in our support of manageable technologies, we appeal to more users and offer a broad product offering in Hyperic. VMware does not intend to change this. As various VMware and SpringSource executives including myself have noted over the last few weeks, openness will continue and thrive in our new environment.

New solutions to new (and growing) problems

I’ve long argued that Hyperic’s vision of management software is aimed at helping people manage a newer, more complex, and more dynamic data center environment. For the last five years we have delivered that vision, including being one of the few management software products providing end‑to‑end support for virtualized application environments from the hardware to the virtualized service component. By joining forces with VMware, Hyperic will continue to fulfill this vision in lockstep with VMware’s ambitions to simplify IT and reduce operational expenses. Earlier this month I was very proud to hear VMware CEO Paul Maritz highlight Hyperic’s technology and vision in his keynote address at VMworld and emphasize how important building the next generation of management solutions is to the future of Vmware. We are proud to be a part of helping fulfill that vision along with the very talented management software experts at Vmware.

Simplicity and Reduced Operating Costs

Flexibility and ease of deployment are key values that have made Hyperic a success in some of the largest and most demanding datacenter environments in the world. These values are shared by our new co-workers from VMware and SpringSource. Companies merge and get acquired for all kinds of different reasons; however in this case it’s fair to say that the common thread that brings us all together is the opportunity to help people build new applications and infrastructure without exponential complexity. This is the value of the cloud, and is the goal that we will continue to reach for as we both expand our existing HQ and IQ products, power new offerings like SpringSource tc Server and CloudFoundry.com, and build the next generation of management products.

While other vendors consolidate, rationalize, and rebrand, we’ll be busy building out new and exciting technologies to help define what management will look like as we enter a truly new era in technology. It’s been an incredible ride thus far (especially the last 100 days) and we hope you will join us for the next chapter. I assure you it will be very interesting.

You can get 4.1.2 here. Have at it!

Thanks to all the users, customers, and engineers that contributed to this release.

Today we are proud to announce that Hyperic has been acquired by SpringSource. It’s been a pretty exciting couple of months here at our San Francisco headquarters. Luckily our team hasn’t missed a beat in our continued quest to build a great software company.

Why is this a Good Thing?

This combined company will provide the widest choice of market-leading products — from a single vendor — that address the needs of developers AND operations.

Over the last 5 years, I’ve come to the conclusion that the divide between developers and operations is a huge obstacle in building more scalable, manageable applications. Hyperic’s most successful customers seem to be the ones who’ve built manageability into their apps, as opposed to those that simply monitor and manage the products the app is built on. These customers use Hyperic technology to gain a better understanding of the behavior and limits of their apps and are more successful at the fine art of keeping them running at optimal performance.

Hyperic has been working hard to help tear down the brick wall that often exists between operations and development. In fact, we started this company because the founders (all developers) knew all too well how tough and distracting it was to be a developer called into firefighting situations (Backflip.com comes to mind…). We started by accepting the incredible responsibility of providing software that wakes ops people up when things inevitably go wrong. We soon realized that there was a bigger opportunity to provide products that help both developers and operations be successful. SpringSource’s acquisition of Hyperic enables us to seize this opportunity as one company. Rod & the SpringSource team agree.

Joining forces with SpringSource gives us the opportunity to reach legions of developers and bring to life the vision of a full lifecycle company. One company which provides modern, open tools, runtimes, and management solutions that are (as described in the Spring Framework mission statement) “a pleasure to use” : developer tools like SpringSource Tool Suite, runtimes like  dm_server and the new tc_server, and of course management from Hyperic HQ & IQ.

As part of this acquisition, it’s important to make clear that SpringSource remains committed to Hyperic’s breadth of managed technologies. Our customers use us to manage Enterprise Java, LAMP, Windows, and Unix environments built on a mixture of open source and commercial middleware. We will continue to innovate around management of virtualized applications as well as those built in the cloud. We will do this because it is part of what makes Hyperic’s technology the top choice for managing the most demanding applications.

What about the team?

Successful acquisitions are all about people. As part of this acquisition, Hyperic’s stellar team will combine with SpringSource’s to create a world-class staff of the most creative product, support, marketing and sales people in the industry. This means that our customers and partners will continue to receive the same high level of product support and innovation from the same folks they have enjoyed working with. I will continue to own and focus on the vision for management & cloud products and will join SpringSource as CTO of Management Products.

Our employees, executives, and directors are extremely excited about the huge opportunity this combined company represents. In an time where mergers among goliaths are the norm, the teams behind two fast growing, young companies are combining to provide the world an alternative to the locked-in, old-school, painful, and expensive software of the 20th century.

How did we get here?

In 2004, our founders Doug, Charles, Ryan, John and I set out to redefine how large-scale web applications and infrastructure are managed.  We wanted to create a company built around software that was focused on the new era of operations management and capable of handling the latest Web technologies, constant change and the demanding environments of mission-critical applications. More than anything, we wanted to build a company that changed the way people evaluate, purchase, and deploy enterprise-grade management technology. I think we succeeded!  Proof of that success can be found in many hundreds of happy customers and over 5,000 open source deployments.

SpringSource has a similar vision.  Just as we revolutionized the way companies monitor and manage applications, SpringSource has defined a new era for application development with the Spring Framework. They’ve extended that now to a broader vision around run-times and management (us) to give customers and the community an entire application lifecycle platform.  Like us, SpringSource depends on the innovation and collaboration that is only possible through Open Source. Our commitment to our community will strengthen through our combination with SpringSource’s extensive experience in building great open source projects.

What’s next?

Obviously, this acquisition brings up a lot of questions.  We are 100 percent committed to providing answers and helping make this transition as seamless and transparent as possible for our customers, partners, employees and community.  As such, we have set up several forums where people can go to get more information:

• Visit the announcement landing page
• Read the press release
• Join us for a Webinar on May 20th when we will share our vision

Rod Johnson (CEO of SpringSource) also shared his thoughts on what this means for SpringSource on his blog.

I couldn’t be prouder of what we have accomplished at Hyperic over the last five years.  Today’s announcement is a testament to the top-notch product, services and sales support that we have built in our organization.

We’re excited to starting working together as the SpringSource team.

You can get 4.1.1 here. Enjoy!

And as always, thanks to the many users, customers, and engineers that contributed to this release.

Assuming an entrepreneur wants to be successful, my conclusion is that the only real choices for the basis of a new technology company are open source, the cloud (including SaaS) or innovation that can be considered “indistinguishable from magic” (with due respect to the late Arthur C. Clarke).

Why?

The name of the game these days is to do more with less.  As such, for a business to stand a chance of surviving let alone thriving, it has to be delivered as a service through the cloud (read: easier to adopt, cheaper, more scalable) or be based around a low-cost, open, customer-driven delivery model.

…Or, you’ve got to invent something that is so groundbreaking and world-changing that the market would tolerate the old guard of closed-source innovation.  Something about which tech-savvy, forward-thinking individuals are gap-mouthed and incredulous when they first see it.  Think Linux circa 1992 (wow, UNIX on a PC), virtualization circa 1999 (what?  Windows running on Linux… with sound?!?!?!) and the iPhone circa now (the touch screen is like magic).

I’m not a futurist, of course, but short of a flying car, I’m not clear on what magic could be coming our way.  Any guesses?

According to the report, published on March 17, 2009, “cloud computing is becoming one of the most visible sourcing option for infrastructure and operations professionals. I&O professionals, thus, must be aware of how they will manage this environment from an availability, performance, disaster recovery and service aggregation point of view”.

The Gartner research report suggests IT operations organizations that are using cloud services provided by Amazon or Google should consider Hyperic products to monitor this environment. In addition, development teams desiring to better understand the performance of applications being designed for the cloud should investigate Hyperic’s offerings. We couldn’t agree more. To access the report, you’ll have to talk to Gartner first.

See eValid’s functional test engine in “monitoring mode” perform availability and performance checks of complex web applications — including AJAX applications.  Once the data is collected by eValid, the information is transported and displayed in the Hyperic network status indicator system alongside other critical performance metrics.

Thursday, 19 March 2009 — 11:00am PST / 2:00pm EST

Learn More > https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/617161488

This Webinar will cover:

• How to create reliable, reproducible tests quickly and inexpensively.
• How to tag key performance data to monitor application performance.
• How to handle playback synchronization in AJAX applications.
• How to integrate eValid results into Hyperic HQ.
• How to include eValid-produced data into the Hyperic architecture.
• Show how Hyperic reports application performance results.
• Explain how to integrate eValid data into status monitoring products.

Learn More > https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/617161488

Hope to see you all there!

Thank you to our community members who spent many hours hammering the 4.1 beta release over the past few weeks and got us to this point of a solid GA release. Notable changes and additions include:

HQ Web Services API Updates – The web services API will include a set of command line tools for performing administration and configuration tasks. You will be able to use command line tools to access and update information about inventory, metric templates, alerts, escalations, users, and roles.

MySQL Product Plugin Updates – The MySQL plugin has been optimized to use a minimal amount of queries to capture all performance stats, thereby reducing the impact monitoring could have on overall performance. Replication monitoring has also been added.

Audit Logger – Events around changes to alerts will now be written to the database with an indication of the user that performed the action. Auditing will also optionally be configured to write to a log file.

Support for Private Groups – Users that are authorized to create groups may designate a group to be “private”.  Private groups are invisible to other users, including admin users.  You will be able to share a private group by associating it with a role.

Additional Alert Acknowledge and Fix Options – New options on the Alert Center page will allow you to acknowledge and fix selected alerts, and to annotate acknowledgments.  A new option in the Recent Alerts portlet will allow you to acknowledge Alerts as well as fix them.

Search Returns Usernames – The Search button in upper right corner of each page in user interface now returns users, as well as resources.

SUPPORT IMPROVEMENTS

New HQ Health Database Queries – The Database tab on the HQ Health page will have new queries, one that returns a count of stalled escalations, and two that show database locks and activity.  The new queries are troubleshooting aids for Hyperic support.

HQ Health Database Actions – Actions will be available on the Database tab of the HQ Health page. A purge auto-inventory queue action will allow you to delete the contents of the queue, in the event that you are having trouble importing resources. Another new action will allow you to purge stalled escalations that were detected with the stalled escalation query.

> Download HQ Enterprise
> Download HQ Open Source

Remember, if you’ve got something you’d like to see in our next systems monitoring product release, please post a comment below!

Not so long ago, when a business decided to solve a problem with software, the calculus was simpler: make or buy. Software products came from software vendors, who competed with each other, and with internal development teams to get business.

It’s different now. Pick a problem that can be solved by software, and you’ll find multiple open source offerings. Certainly, the lean and the mean look to the  open source world first. But corporate behemoths are down with it too: acceptance of OSS by the man is old news. And when even the UK government buys in, open source is mainstream.

The “you get what you pay for” adage doesn’t necessarily apply to open source.  Many software companies, including Hyperic, provide robust and rich open source versions, in addition to enterprise editions that customers pay for.  We do pack extra, high-value features into our enterprise version, but we have plenty of users that manage smaller infrastructures quite successfully with the OSS version.

But, back to Mr. Burton’s plea for help. He asks what open source monitoring solution he should use instead of Nagios. Clearly, he should consider Hyperic HQ.   But, perhaps the broader issue is, how do you choose the right open source product, whether you’re looking for IT monitoring or an application to identify weed species in crop systems in the Indo-Gangetic Plains”?  (Not a made up example.)

Cursory research (using a proprietary search engine) indicates there’s a lot more chat about why to choose open source software than how to choose it. One of the few on how to shop around is this ZDNet article; it focuses on how to choose a CMS, but the recommendations apply to any software choice.  The author suggests checking out freely available information for clues about the software publisher’s process, quality, and community.

Here are eight additional ideas to include in your software evaluation checklist:

1. Do you have to build the product to be able to use it? I’d rather this were an option than a requirement, and (personal opinion) the fact that I have to build it myself seems to indicate that ease of implementation and use is not a high priority to the publisher.
2. Is information about the product as free and available as the software itself?  Is there documentation? Or is the information you need on page 200 of 10,000 pages returned by your search query?  If there is documentation, is it current? It should correspond to the current version of the software. Is it documentation free? If it’s not, how do you like paying for information that is required to make the product work?
3. Can you find a statement that unambiguously describes the product’s functionality?  It’s funny how long it can take to figure out that the behavior or feature you’re trying to use isn’t actually supported.
4. Is there a clear definition of what the product is “best” for? Can you figure out what type of environment it was designed for, what its limits are, in terms of scalability, security, or other criteria?
5. Can you locate information about the implementation process, like how much configuration is required, and what’s involved?  For instance, to configure a behavior, do you use a web UI, edit a property file, or modify the source code?
6. How big, active, and satisfied is the community. User forums tell you a lot.  Do questions get answered?  Do many responses suggest “reading the code”?  (Danger Will Robinson.) Are there actual contributions – new features, plugins, extensions, etc. – from community members?
7. Will you get the support that you need? Obviously, this depends on your appetite for self-support and the impact of unsolved problems on your mission.  If you don’t have a high tolerance for unsolved bugs or unanswered questions, is there somewhere to go for support, even if you have to pay for it?
8. Is there a growth path? Assuming the software has some hard limits, in terms of scalability, security, or functionality, what will you do when you hit them? Is there a fuller-function offering you can migrate to easily?;-)

Bottom line, Mr. Burton should have no trouble finding a good OSS monitoring solution. Perhaps he’ll use take this advice and make the right choice. :-)

Unfortunately, with networks operating across numerous remote locations and business functions managed across a spectrum of platforms, services and applications, compiling comprehensive performance metrics regarding application and systems performance is difficult, costly and time consuming.

Analysis of systems has often required outsourcing number crunching and bringing in expensive consultants with systems integration and monitoring authority and expertise. Home-grown, systems-born scripts and inadequate monitoring solutions simply don’t provide the level of utility and visibility required to provide the assurances that IT and web operations are running efficiently.

Systems Monitoring: The Nexus: A Single Console

Employing best business practices, monitoring takes place at three distinct levels:

Reactive monitoring, including server and storage issues. Reactive monitoring generally produces a trouble ticket for the IT and operations staff. Further, reactive monitoring provides diagnostic metrics but only occurs when and after there’s a problem.

Obviously, this means lowered productivity and even high-priced downtime, sure to lessen business margins across the board.  Tools that are used for reactive monitoring are typically red-green light displays (system on/system off).  No performance intelligence is provided for analysis and system refinement. Just a display of on-off settings. Frankly, not very useful in assessment and planning.

Proactive monitoring, is the process by which a systems management console routinely checks the health across the entire configuration of platforms and supported applications. This pro-active approach identifies problems and downstream consequences. However, this constant, automated oversight creates increased network traffic and stress on the various devices that comprise the system under pro-active scrutiny.

Predictive monitoring employs telemetrics to seek out failure points within the system and to identify these potential weaknesses before they become expensive fixes. Predictive monitoring has been employed by the military and nuclear energy industry for years, enabling operators to analyze real-time data prior to a negative impact on the project or operation.

Today’s business web infrastructures employ variations of predictive monitoring.  These “solutions” are heavily dependent on agents that “live” on host platforms and continuously measure deep interactions across the chimney stack of software and services.  This intense, on-going monitoring enables sophisticated systems administrators and operations teams to ID degradation at all service levels and, to eliminate response latency before real-time issues turn into real-world problems.

Predictive monitoring pinpoints a variety of potential system failures including:

• pending hardware failures
• malformed queries
• memory leaks
• broken or run-away threads
• software bloat (usually associated with long-running applications)

To maintain highest efficiencies, today’s businesses employ quality monitoring services solutions and avoid the low-end, unsupported OSS and low-cost “work-arounds” that don’t deliver metrics in a format useable by all stakeholders.

Simple.

We value your input and appreciate any comments, bugs or problems you may find. Not only does this make HQ 4.1 a more stable release but it also enscribes your name into Hyperic history as a contributor!

Current build number is 1009 and can be found on Sourceforge. The release notes and detailed feature descriptions can be found on the Hyperic website and any bugs or problems you find should be posted in our Bugs Forum.

On top of that, we have decided to embark down a new path which will be beneficial to everyone, especially our customers. This new path means we will be doing quarterly releases to Hyperic HQ. It’s very exciting news internally for our engineering team because now they can crank out new features four times a year!

Below you will find the full list of expected features and improvements coming out sometime in mid-March. These features are all queued up to make this dot release but we of course reserve the right to add/remove as neccessary.

FEATURE UPDATES

HQ Web Services API Updates – The web services API will include a set of command line tools for performing administration and configuration tasks. You will be able to use command line tools to access and update information about inventory, metric templates, alerts, escalations, users, and roles.

MySQL Product Plugin Updates – The MySQL plugin has been optimized to use a minimal amount of queries to capture all performance stats, thereby reducing the impact monitoring could have on overall performance. Replication monitoring has also been added.

NEW FEATURES

Audit Logger – Events around changes to alerts will now be written to the database with an indication of the user that performed the action. Auditing will also optionally be configured to write to a log file.

Support for Private Groups – Users that are authorized to create groups may designate a group to be “private”.  Private groups are invisible to other users, including admin users.  You will be able to share a private group by associating it with a role.

Additional “Add to Group” Options – You will be able to add a resource to an existing, as well as a new, group on the Browse Resource page.

Additional Delete Option – The Tools menu for any resource will allow you to delete the resource, or add it to a new group.

Additional Alert Acknowledge and Fix Options – New options on the Alert Center page will allow you to acknowledge and fix selected alerts, and to annotate acknowledgments.  A new option in the Recent Alerts portlet will allow you to acknowledge Alerts as well as fix them.

Search Returns Usernames – The Search button in upper right corner of each page in user interface now returns users, as well as resources.

INFRASTRUCTURE CHANGES

HQ Support for Oracle 11g – The HQ database will be able to run on Oracle 11G. Support for Oracle 9i will be deprecated.

JBoss Server Upgrade – HQ Server will be deployed using JBoss 4.2.3. This will be an upgrade from JBoss 4.0.3 SP1 used in previous HQ releases.

Asynchronous Resource Deletion – When you click the Delete button on the Browse Resource tab, selected resources will be deleted from the database asynchronously.  Although the resources will immediately disappear from the resource listing in the HQ user interface, there may be a short delay before resources are deleted from the database.

SUPPORT IMPROVEMENTS

New HQ Health Database Queries – The Database tab on the HQ Health page will have new queries, one that returns a count of stalled escalations, and two that show database locks and activity.  The new queries are troubleshooting aids for Hyperic support.

HQ Health Database Actions – Actions will be available on the Database tab of the HQ Health page. A purge auto-inventory queue action will allow you to delete the contents of the queue, in the event that you are having trouble importing resources. Another new action will allow you to purge stalled escalations that were detected with the stalled escalation query.

License Expiration Email – HQ Enterprise will issue email notifications that your HQ license expiration is near.  Email notifications commence 45 days prior to license expiration.

Well, there you have it folks. The tenative list of features, changes, and improvements due out in mid-March. We are always listening to our customers and potential customers regarding new system management features so if you’ve got something you’d like to see in our next release, please post a comment below.

Members of the Hyperic team will be our booth #24 all day Saturday and Sunday (Feb 21 and 22).  Can you imagine a better way to spend your weekend?  Bring your toughest monitoring questions to us – we’ll do our best to answer them on the spot.  Ask us about how we are helping the world’s largest SaaS providers monitor and manage their environments.

If you are in Southern California and have not signed up for SCaLE, it’s not too late! Passes are still available for one day at $10 (limited access) or for the entire conference at $70 (full access). Send us an email and we’ll send you a code for 40% off the admission fee.

We’re looking forward to the conference and hope to see you all there!

The challenge: share something truly unique and extraordinary with us in the comments or by email (marty at hyperic dot com) and we’ll make it worth your while in the form of Hyperic swag and maybe even Internet fame (assuming you want Internet fame).

So, dear readers and HQ users, what say you?

Developers like the cloud since it lets them bypass operations (i.e., the control agents) and serve their environment needs quickly. In the cloud, developers can build an application and launch it themselves, on their own, without waiting for hardware to be purchased, racked & stacked.  Without waiting for hardware or virtualization capacity planning, electricity consumption plans, cooling or green discussions to finish. If you’re a developer, the cloud offers speed! The cloud is way cool. You’re the man. But developers too often forget to ask themselves what happens afterwards?  Who will make sure the app is always available?  Apps in the cloud will still have performance issues and will still break.

The first cloud dilemma for developers… For better or for worse (up for debate), by publishing to the cloud devs become responsible for all three phases of the application – build, deploy and manage – whereas typically they are only responsible for the build stage.  Red flag – few developers have an operations background. And they usually know little about application performance monitoring, or the tools of this trade.

Developers often misstep by putting a web application up on Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing environment assuming that bad code, bad programming or a poor choice of architecture is somehow not a problem, or that it will somehow work out in the end. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.  Can the ease of spinning up a new AMI in a nanosecond mask application performance problems like malformed queries, memory leaks and runaway processes?  Maybe, but the issues will catch up with you and you’ll be running up lots of unnecessary charges on AWS.

The second cloud dilemma for developers is subtle but should frighten any business that has to stand behind a service or application that it hosts in the heavens. This dilemma is centered around service level agreements (SLAs) that developers must consider to avoid becoming become trapped between a rock and a hard place.

The Rock: The SLA the developer provides to customers
The Hard Place: The SLA that the cloud provides to the developer

Almost never shall the two meet. What developer wants to be on the hook for a customer SLA that REQUIRES MORE THAN the cloud platform’s SLA? You’d be surprised how many developers make this bad decision and don’t even know it.

With the cloud, It comes down to this — performance, cost and availability are at the center of a very important job that rests in the hands of someone who typically doesn’t have the experience to make those decisions alone, the developer. That’s a dilemma no business wants to find itself in.

We believe that companies have two options.  One: continue to leverage our friends, the ops guys, to make sure your applications perform — wherever they may live.  And two: wait for the inevitable evolution of the role of developers  –  some will learn new skills and address the monitoring and management challenges head on.

How about you? Are your apps in the cloud rock solid? Do you see any “epic fails” in the cloud that you don’t see on-premise?  Who manages your apps in the cloud?

To find out what goodies await you in 4.0.3, please checkout the Release Notes.

Thanks again to all that contributed feature ideas and bug reports to this release!

Hyperic IQ allows you to report on any metrics, any resources, in any data center with support of a variety of chart types, including gauges, multi-metric line charts, bar graphs, and stacked charts. You can also create reports in the format that makes the data most useable, whether PDF, Excel, Rich Text Format, comma-separated values, or Flash. Not only that but with Hyperic IQ, you can also expose and deliver reports with ease to anyone within your organization. That’s the power of Hyperic IQ.

I can rant and rave all day about our new reporting suite but it’s probably best if you read more about it for yourself! For more information, check out our IQ reporting launch page, IQ products page, or download the IQ datasheet (.pdf).

If you have any comments or feedback from our announcement today, I’d love to hear from you below.

To find out what holiday surprises you might find in 4.0.2, please checkout the Release Notes.

Thanks again to all that contributed feature ideas and bug reports to this release!

It is great to see the affirmation of our vision towards global application transparency being adopted by cloud providers.  Google has put itself on the right track, but there is much more work to be done.

Specifically, centralized management, alerting, and visualization of applications is important.  Many App Engine apps are built in a heterogenous fashion (reliant on external web-services or facilities), which requires a different type of dashboard to see all components side-by-side.  Hyperic HQ is able to pull application-specific metrics from App Engine and render them along-side data from the rest of your infrastructure.  Google’s interest is not in performance management across your infrastructure, but the metrics which they capture in their environment is exceptional, which is why we would call on them to make their dashboard data open and accessible via web-services.  Users with heterogenous applications must be easily able to correlate performance issues from different parts of their environment.

The next year is going to be very exciting for cloud platforms, and we’re proud to be among the essential tools that developers need.  Keep your eyes on cloudstatus.com next year — the cloud is about to get … less  cloudy.

– Jon

Now past its 5th year of production usage, it’s incredibly cool for me to see how this product has evolved from what we conceived back in 2002. With the help of hundreds of customers and thousands of users, we’ve been able to stay focused on two key themes that drive everything we build into our product:

1- the desire to build products that help people manage large scale web environments
2- the desire to build products that do not create new problems while attempting to solve old ones

HQ 4.0 represents a big step forward for both of those themes. HQ 4.0 provides unique levels of visibility into every aspect of web applications and then uses that visibility to offer insight into diagnosing complex issues from virtualization layers all the way up the stack, forecast capacity requirements, and helping operations teams get reliable, detailed notification of problems before they create a crisis. HQ 4.0 also delivers these benefits alongside a whole new set of automation capabilities including extended, open API’s, UI automation workflows, and automatic agent upgrading. In a time when the demands of data center operations teams increase while resources are scarce, we want to make sure our technology helps people manage more with less.

4.0 also represents Hyperic’s continued commitment to innovation in the management space. 4.0 introduces the worlds first web application management solution designed and packaged natively for the Amazon AWS cloud. HQ for AWS is packaged as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) which leverages technology like Elastic Block Storage to provide a fully cloud-enabled solution that can be deployed as easily as any other EC2 AMI out there. It also provides the first cloud-friendly management agent which allows users to manage cloud based virtual machines securely and reliably from either inside the cloud, or from HQ 4.0 installations inside your datacenter. Our good friend John Willis wrote up his impressions on the importance of this new development in HQ’s architecture on his blog.

CloudStatus.com, our free cloud monitoring service is actually built on HQ 4.0 and has been running inside EC2 since inception. We use this experience to build the coolest, richest monitoring and management product for companies looking to deploy production web applications inside AWS. Over the next few weeks we’ll be announcing innovative pricing plans for users of this HQ 4.0 for AWS and additional management features aimed at letting HQ 4.0 users leverage the benefits of all Amazon Web Services as part of their applications.

Thanks again to all our developers, customers, and community members for helping us create this very exciting release.

“A recent IDC survey of IT executives, CIOs, and their line of business (LOB) colleagues shows that cloud services are ‘crossing the chasm’ and entering a period of widespread adoption. Moreover, IDC expects the cloud adoption trend to be amplified by the current financial crisis. The cloud model offers a much cheaper way for businesses to acquire and use IT – in an economic downturn, the appeal of that cost advantage will be greatly magnified. This advantage is especially important for small and medium businesses, a sector that will be key target in any plan for recovery.”

The report goes on to cite that spending on IT cloud services will triple in the next 5 years, reaching $42 billion and capturing 25% of IT spending growth in 2012 and nearly a third of growth the following year. With he overall IT market spend being $383 billion, this kind of growth validates that the opportunity deserves the attention it is getting.

IDC is also first to point out that its not just cloud vendors – the Amazons, Googles and Salesforces of the world will not get this pie exclusively. In fact, just as important are all the offerings that support the development, delivery and deployment of those consuming these services, which is the market Hyperic is in – bridging the gap for monitoring between the datacenter and the cloud

In fact, in the survey, two of the top 4 demands are areas that Hyperic is solving:

CloudStatus – providing real-time visibility into the health and availability of cloud providers, giving users a third-party perspective into SLAs

Hyperic HQ – providing real-time trending, analysis and control capabilities to maintain the performance of your web applications. This can run the gamut of possibilities from helping to improve the performance of your application, to making critical infrastructure architecture decisions quickly (e.g., spawning new virtualized resources or shifting loads from the cloud to your datacenter and vice-versa based on demand or performance changes).

I am sure there will continue to be pundits of all kinds of caliber, and while cloud computing may seem at times too much like inflated marketing-speak, the delivery model and innovative services that are powering this growth are unquestionable. Its nice to have some independent analyst numbers to back it up. Thanks Frank & all the rest of the IDC team for sharing this.

The failure of some of these finance giants reduced the amount of flowing capital in our market. There is a concept I learned at Penn State as an economics major, called the velocity of money. Its a co-efficient that basically says for every real dollar, it can be lent out multiple times and create an economy that can be, say worth 7 dollars for every real one dollar. Lender failures reduced that some. What has paralyzed it is headlines citing that you may not be able to get money out of ATMs. This reduces the number of “real dollars” to start from. This is the consumer – not these banks.

Capital is harder to come by because of both this top level problem of viable financial institutions to create the velocity factor and a reduced denominator of real dollars led by consumer mistrust of having money in the bank/stocks/etc.

Today I see this sensationalism crossing even more headlines of where it shouldn’t have gone in the first place. Barron’s is reporting Salesforce.com: Rain Clouds for Cloud Computing. Yes, there is reduced capital for companies looking to finance risky ventures. Cloud computing isn’t one.

Think about it. Cloud computing is all about a market of commoditized IT. It reduces the risk of IT investment – dramatically lowering the bar on the amount of capital needed to enter, as well as the liabilities extended liabilities if the investment failed. SAP suffering makes sense, its customers deal with an enormous amount of capital – and their investments are considerable and lengthy. Some pause there makes sense – especially given the panic the media is inciting.

Cloud computing is entirely designed for opportunists. Invention, innovation, and growth will be in this sector. Incumbents who drag significant historical costs with them when changing direction may have problems keeping up with a dynamic market and economy. They are going to stagnate. But IT providers and their customers that are investing in “pay-as-you-grow” IT investments that not only cuts costs but speeds time to market have nothing short of an explosive opportunity to redirect an enormous portion of IT investment dollars very quickly.

Salesforce is being judged by their traditional CRM business just like SAPs business, and it shouldn’t be. Apples and oranges. The CRM market is fairly saturated (I should know, I have 10 years of Siebel under my belt). Their Force.com is what they should be judged on – they’ve created an entire ready-to-use marketplace around innovating new products and services to their core customers. The opportunities there for innovative new companies to start up, and reach success quickly – and expand the usefulness of the Saleforce CRM deployment is nothing short of genius and has an awesome market opportunity to grow despite this economic climate. In fact, its success is probably going to accelerate because of it.

Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane.

And of course, Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, who told the Guardian his opinion of cloud computing:

It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign.

I wasn’t surprised at Larry’s reaction, as the more classical IT enterprise that his business serves is by definition going to be a late adopter. I was surprised at Stallman, however.

His arguments went for a general theme of cloud computing being too much risk for the CIO. Funny, as open source suffered the same start. Open source weathered many years of questions on what it is, how could businesses accept the indemnification risks, and of course how mature were the products being developed under its banner.

Hyperic has embraced both. We open sourced our software in 2006, and have roots in open source starting in the nineties from Netscape to Apache from our founders. It’s also no secret that Hyperic, and its users, are early adopters of the cloud. We’ve been part of this trend unfolding, visibly so with our CloudStatus service.

We didn’t do either because they were cool, or for any desire to be some sort of fashionable IT software company. We did it because it makes sense for our users, and both are an approach to building more affordable, useful, and scalable IT.

Open source is a business model for us to work with our users – they are building modern web-driven applications and need better monitoring and management for these dynamic, custom-built environments. Since they are web-afficianados when they have a problem they consult, that’s right – the web. They do a Google search, they look for how others solved it – and they look for the straightest line to applying the same solutions to their unique situation. They want self-service. They want quick results. Open source lets them download and use the software without unneccesary limits on time, scale or its application. Once our software establishes its value, if there is more opportunity to help them more, we have an educated, successful, in-house champion to help work through the sale. We save a lot on the cost of sales and support this way. The customers in turn save time and money in completing their solution. Open source is way to package our products and services to ease adoption so everyone benefits.

Cloud computing is much the same. Cloud computing is a system of technologies and services that have commoditized IT to make it more readily consumable, scalable, and cost-effective for everyone. It has leveraged the innovation and expertise of Internet giants like Amazon and Google, and is making it accessible to anyone with the next big idea. It removes the investment in physical and human resources to scale up a business. It affords more folks to try their ideas and vet its worth in the market. It also affords these same businesses to scale out as quickly as their business demands. Cloud computing, same as open source, is a way to package products and services to ease adoption so everyone benefits.

Open source was sexy because it was toppling the big guys by eroding their market shares. They *mostly* now all get that it is a better way to do business with a larger, more unpredictable market that prefer to leverage open components to construct their own inventions.

Cloud computing is sexy because it taps into the entrepreneur’s “CIO envy”, as the451group’s Rachel Chalmers called it when we last spoke. This “CIO envy” channels the aspirations for anyone to be the next Facebook. It removes the need for deep pockets and a deep technical bench to scale up their business to go to market, and scale out to capitalize on customer demand. It will come in all shapes and sizes, from infrastructure services to software application services to development platform services and all the surrounding implementation support services that typically surround IT. Regardless of the form, its purpose will be the same – to reduce IT complexity to create scalable, building blocks that can be consumed and paid for based on real usage.

In short, the term may evolve to become not as sexy, but the concept, just like open source, is too big and attractive to ignore.

We are one release closer to the launch of 4.0! Hyperic HQ 4.0 is designed for greater ease of implementation, management and scale. It also features a swank new UI, a new API, JMX MBean Query tool and more plugins. If you’re thinking about deploying 4.0, you can start testing it out now:

• Download the HQ 4.0 Beta now!
• Download the HQ Enterprise Beta!

Beta Program: Round 4

Round 4 of the 4.0 beta has commenced. Four as in “four people have already earned a Hyperic mousepad”, as in “four more are well on their way to earning the mug.” How did they do it? They installed the 4.0 beta, and logged some bugs.

• Join now, there’s still time to get a mug or fleece!

Hyperic 4.0 Overview and Demo

In case you missed last week’s HyperCAST, it was all about Hyperic HQ 4.0. Don Baron, Sales Engineer and Chip Witt, Product Manager show off the new face of the dashboard and get under the hood of the soon-to-be latest version of Hyperic HQ. We know some people sign up, and then forget or suddenly have a meeting and just can’t make it to the live HyperCAST–not to name names pythagoras42, but you never show up. In any case, we’ve archived it for you.

• Watch the Hyperic HQ Enterprise 4.0 Overview (in the archives).

Upcoming and Archived HyperCASTs

Speaking of HyperCASTs, on Tuesday, October 7th we take a closer look at the JMX MBean Query tool. Learn how to simplify the management of Java apps under HQ.

• Sign up for the HyperCAST

If you missed or want to re-watch any of our HyperCASTs, we have built a library of archives.

New Hyperic OEM Partner: Dalet

The Hyperic Partner Program is growing at a rapid pace. The newest member of our OEM Partner program is Dalet Digital Media Systems, a worldwide leader in Media Asset Management (MAM) solutions. Dalet selected Hyperic HQ Enterprise to power its upcoming Dalet Dashboard, essentially building a complete monitoring and management tool for the broadcast industry in a matter of months by partnering with Hyperic. For more details on their project check out the press release.

Best of the Blog

• Learn about the Hyperic 4.0 Beta Program.
• SYS-CON TV interviews Hyperic CEO, Javier Soltero.
• Contegix + Hyperic HQ=Happy Sys Admins.

News Roundup

• The Guardian says weather in the clouds can get stormy.
• Roberto Galoppini posted about Hyperic’s European expansion
• Information Week reports that Oracle and Intel are ramping up cloud efforts.