Sentra – What do you Want to do Today?

The ‘single pane of glass’ enterprise monitoring solution – Sentra – utilises ‘extraction agents’, deployed onto remote systems within your network and retrieves data in real-time for instant analysis, reporting and escalation. The benefit of this approach makes it much more efficient than a single monolithic collection program.

Encompassing various types of agents across multiple platforms, enables you to see the ‘bigger picture’ all from within a single Sentra browser based console.

Example top-level Hypervisor

Management, configuration and deployment is performed via the Sentra interface, the result of which will be the provision of hypervisors, charts, dashboards, alerts, rules, reports  and query engines.

Several agents can be deployed to locations around the network to gain a full picture of service availability.

Types of Extraction Agents

The feature rich set of Sentra’s extraction layers encompass multiple protocols, logs, events, process, performance counters, the list of which would result in a very lengthy article. So, to relieve you of any boredom, a description of some of the application based layers are described.

Payments Monitoring

Capture of Base 24 ATM and POS transactions by Sentra and has proved to be able to retrieve the complete contents of the TLF and PTLF logs from the HPE NonStop platform to a Sentra SQL Server database.  This applies to one or more BASE24 systems.

Sentra provides real-time alerting capabilities including the ability to perform ad-hoc queries, the process of which are otherwise not possible.

Even with high data processing volumes of several thousand transactions/sec, the impact on the host HPE NonStop system is minimal.

Real-time Dashboards

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NCR Authentic and BESS payments can also be monitored those payments systems that utilise Linux, Oracle and/or HPE NonStop.

Authentic Real-Time Hypervisor

HPE NonStop/Unix/Linux Performance Counters

On non-Windows platforms key performance indicators such as CPU usage, processes and disk space can be collected into performance counter format.

Sentra is therefore able to simultaneously  monitor key performance metrics across multiple platforms and operating system types.

NonStop Real-Time Hypervisor

HPE NonStop EMS Event Data

The HPE NonStop operating system and its applications are richly instrumented through EMS events and these event logs, both Primary and Alternate, can be monitored for any new events. Utilising Sentra’s query engine, events can be queried down to cause, effect, recovery, both real-time and historical.

XML Data Collection

A general purpose XML agent can be configured to parse arbitrary xml data into a hierarchical structure of Sentra SQL tables and fields.

This makes the information much easier to process and report on, whilst maintaining the relationships between the XML elements. The agent can be configured using an XSD schema or (where a schema is not available) by loading examples of the xml structure to capture.

The configuration screens automatically create the SQL database tables needed to store a given structure. The agent can collect XML data from files, MQ queues or from IPM messages sent directly to it.

A series of these XML agents can be deployed to key monitoring points (waypoints) within a payment processing infrastructure to monitor transaction volumes and trends, payment volumes and trends and end-to-end processing times.

Rules can be configured to monitor service level compliance and abnormal processing volumes.

XML Configuration for monitoring by Sentra

This article has focused on just a couple of the various extraction layers that Sentra provides to our customers. Other enterprise based extraction layers incorporate:

• Server Monitoring
• Directory Monitoring
• Windows Event Logs
• Unix/Linux System Logs
• Generic Log Extract
• Windows Performance Counters
• JMX MBean Monitoring
• X500/Ldap/Active Directory
• Application Response
• IBM MQ
• SNMP Monitoring
• SysLog Protocol Monitoring
• SQL Query Monitoring
• Email Message Tracking
• Process Monitoring

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