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resources. Such an environment also would require many resources and constant
configuration to ensure that systems were maximized in availability and perfor-
mance. Therefore, rather than build a perfect management environment, you
must create something that's better than what exists today but that is feasible to
construct and maintain.
1.1.3
Management for the real world
A feasible solution would blend the current management capabilities and the
ideal environment. By gathering and combining information about the health of
network devices and applications, better decisions can be made and proactive
management can occur either automatically or by IT personnel. Let's walk
through the example bicycle shop web application, which has been built with
management in mind.
A proposed management solution
Suppose you are running the online bicycle shop we've mentioned previously:
customers can purchase bicycles and bike gear from your web site. In order to
ensure that the customer's shopping experience is not interrupted, you have
installed a secondary server to take queries if the first server fails. In this environ-
ment, web servers, application servers, a database, and networking hardware
provide your web site services. The following items represent the major monitor-
ing and management needs for such an application and its environment:
Monitoring the system health of platforms and hardware— You need to know the
health of your web and application servers, as well as the hardware that
hosts them. The networking hardware exposes SNMP interfaces that report
its health and any faults that occur. Likewise, the web server is instru-
mented to report errors and has a mechanism that allows you to query its
health. The database is instrumented so that its performance can be que-
ried, along with its health and possible faults.
Configuring resources at the application level— You probably want to be able to
make direct contact with your bicycle shop services for configuration and
management. When you wrote your bicycle shop application, you had the
foresight to instrument it to give you the information you need to actively
manage the system with a management tool built specifically for your envi-
ronment. For instance, you can connect to your bicycle shop server process
and change the number of items displayed on one page of the catalog.
Your management application can also query the environment services. If
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