GEM - Monitoring Architecture

GEM uses a standards-based, open architecture to provide a platform that unifies best-of-breed systems and network management and monitoring technologies in a flexible, extensible framework.

Data Generation Tier
The data generation tier contains the servers, network devices, servers, applications monitored by GEM.

Data Collection Tier
The data collection tier is responsible for gathering status and performance information from the monitored nodes in the data generation tier. Data collection tasks can be initiated by the monitored node or by the data collection component. Status and performance data can be collected via a number of mechanisms depending on the options deployed including:

• SNMP polling, traps, MIBs, NFlows, SFlows
• Syslogs, event logs, and application logs
• Windows Management Instrumentation
• Nagios®* plugins
• Nmap
• Ganglia
• Ntop
• Synthetic transactions
• Database client Interfaces (DBI)
• Open source agents and open source plug-ins
  

Data Management Tier
The data management tier is responsible for transforming, consolidating and storing status and performance data fed from the data collection tier. The data management tier is divided in to:

• Data monitoring adapters. The data monitoring adapters transform status information from the data collection tier into homogenized units of monitoring data. Transformations such as consolidation and mapping are applied to the monitoring data before they are inserted in to the common data model.
• Common data model. The common data model contains the current and past state of the monitored environment. It includes status and performance information and is continuously updated as data monitoring adapters feed new status information in to the system. The common data model also contains an abstract representation of the configuration of the monitored environment including profile configurations, alerting and escalation rules and performance data retention rules.

Application Programming Interfaces. At the upper edge the data management tier provides standard interfaces to the monitoring configuration, administration configuration, host and service status and performance data. Various interfaces are provided including a PHP binding, a secured SOAP API and a performance data API.

Presentation Tier
The presentation tier provides user interfaces for all of the GEM application views; integrating the presentation of user interfaces for third-party applications and providing hooks to integrate external applications. The Presentation tier includes:

• Task-oriented dashboards, from executive overviews to technical details
• Alerts, messages, and status with drilldown
• Performance charting and graphing
• Configuration management and administration
• Operational and trend reporting

The presentation tier also enforces user security and role-based permissions, enabling the GEM to be tailored to the security needs of a wide variety of organizations.

The presentation tier can also integrate with other solutions to provide outputs into ITSM dashboards and other third party consoles.

* Nagios is a registered trademark of Nagios Enterprises