Gateway Hub for Geneos
Scalable big data storage of metrics and events
Gateway Hub is a key part of ITRS Group’s strategy to build better, smarter, more efficient monitoring to create operational resilience for the always-on enterprise. Available for download now, Gateway Hub will achieve this by addressing a number of key areas for improvement in the Geneos architecture.
Before Gateway Hub, historic data was only available through SQL database logging. However relational databases are not suited to the huge volumes of data being processed these days, forcing users to choose a subset of their metrics to log. This often means that investigating incidents is made more difficult, if not impossible, when relevant data has not been stored.
With Gateway Hub, all data can be reliably stored using compression rates of as much as 80% to keep costs to a minimum, and retrieved using a REST API. This allows for better incident investigation and sets the foundations for better monitoring through historical data in a subsequent release.
A new web-based UI
Gateway Hub also provides the platform for the Web Console, a new web-based UI accessed through the browser. As of the current Gateway Hub version, 1.1, the Web Console primarily manages Gateway Hub; checking the status of data ingestion from Gateways, and some related administrative functions such as setting the retention policy for metric and event data. Over the next few releases a brand new monitoring interface will be added, which will first complement, then later replace Active Console.
The Web Console is a modern, attractive UI designed to support much larger environments. It will also provide simpler ways of creating dashboards and data visualisation.
Support for much larger estates
The architecture of Gateway Hub sets the scene for monitoring at significantly larger scale. For example, its clustered architecture provides greater resilience, and its message bus allows more reliable delivery of metrics. Combined with the Web Console it is able to monitor and visualise significantly more than before.
Building for the Future
Open APIs
Gateway Hub is driven entirely through APIs. These are being made public to allow easy integration with other proprietary and 3rd party applications in the production tools landscape. Data can also be published to an external Kafka instance providing full access to all Geneos data.
Better monitoring through historical data
Applying advanced analytics on the metrics and events stored in Gateway Hub will facilitate much more powerful rules to be set on the data, such as taking into account daily or hourly variations rather than simple thresholds. Historical data can also be used to determine “normality” and establish baselines, as well as detecting anomalies and correlations between metrics.
Centralised Configuration
The amount of monitoring in a typical estate has dramatically increased over the last few years and so has the administrative burden. Gateway Hub will alleviate this by providing the tools and infrastructure for administering centrally. As well as making it quicker and simpler to manage Geneos at scale, centralised configuration allows policies and best practices to be encouraged or enforced across the entire estate.
Advanced Architecture
Initially Gateway Hub will sit alongside the traditional Geneos components. Data is published from the Gateway into Gateway Hub where it can be retrieved by Active Console, Web Console and third party clients via REST API:
Eventually the functionality of the Gateway will be entirely absorbed into Gateway Hub, whereby the old architecture will be entirely modernised.
Partnering to deliver superior performance
The technology stack underpinning Gateway Hub is built on the MapR converged data platform. MapR provides better scalability and enterprise support for the big data while remaining fully API compatible with the Open Source ecosystem. This has the added benefit of requiring less expensive hardware as the MapR stack is faster and it better compresses data resulting in less CPU and disk requirements.
To learn how Gateway Hub can support you now, contact your account manager today
