Fantastic Five: Super Cloud-based Management Tools

Fantastic Five: Super Cloud-based Management Tools

· Combines and groups various alarms based on host, network device, application, database, and other criteria.
· Works with Solarwinds, PRTG, Nagios, HP Site Scope, App Dynamic, Loggly, New Relic, Site24x7, Copper Egg, and other monitoring and SaaS products.
· Lets you respond to alarms generated by the dozens of management systems likely to be present in the typical IT environment, without having to sign into each system separately.
· Consolidates alarms to generate a data model that provides insight into your overall monitoring.
· Automatically categorizes alarms based on source, severity, application, host, network component, database, and other characteristics.
· Alarm Poller uses REST APIs or custom scripts to collect and consolidate alarms in widely distributed systems.

· Allows IT departments to orchestrate, automate, and enforce policies that apply to multiple cloud apps and platforms.
· Facilitates enforcing limits on virtual machine types and sizes, network use, regional placement, naming conventions, and other operations.
· Supports use of either Microsoft Active Directory or OpenLDAP to centralize authentication and authorization; lets you implement single sign-on across public and private clouds.
· Role-based access control (RBAC) allows managers to restrict user access to individual features, which simplifies policy management when provisioning.
· Sophisticated cost analytics provide a big-picture view of your cloud spending to enhance budgeting and showback/chargeback; customize notifications to administrators when a budget limit is exceeded.
· Integrates smoothly with existing content-management databases, notifications, security, and audit systems via WebHooks dispatched as standard HTTP JSON requests.

· Log-analysis tool collects and analyzes data from every kind of app, server, and network.
· Uses the Splunk Search Processing Language to correlate events and identify patterns across diverse data sources.
· Offers customizable dashboards that let you drill down from any chart to the raw events underlying it, as well as links to other dashboards, forms, views, or external websites.
· Alerts can automatically trigger such actions as remedial script execution or posts to an RSS feed.

· Python library and command-line tool for managing app development and management via SSH.
· Includes operations for executing local or remote shell commands, prompting users for input, uploading/downloading files, and other functions.
· Pass runtime parameters into tasks using a shell-compatible notation, and specify connection information in your fabfile or at the command line rather than at runtime by setting the global host list, env.hosts.
· Context managers preserve directory and local system states between connections, similar to running the CD command during an SSH session to run multiple commands.
· Simpler and quicker to learn than the more-powerful Ansible app-management tool.

· Orchestration framework that features a service-oriented model based on iterative directed convergence with system-wide cross-node dependencies.
· Intended for configuring physical infrastructure comprised of heterogeneous hardware, operating systems, and management tools.
· BIOS settings and RAID configuration set automatically depending on how the system will be used.
· Support for IPMI and WSMan for out-of-band configuration and management.
· Commercial support via RackN, a company founded by Crowbar creators Rob Hershfeld, Greg Althaus, Scott Jensen, and Dan Choquette.