Consolidating multiple fusion reactors

[Tim Cunningham]

At last count my company IDMI has 41 licenses for Fusion reactor. I
would love to have a consolidated view that shows me all me copies of
FR across the internet and to alert me to issues visually. Do you have
anything like that? Is there a FR API that could let me write
something like that?

Tim Cunningham
IDMI

[charlie arehart]

Tim, if I'm understanding your question, here is an answer. (Others may give
an abbreviated version, but you know me, I want to be complete so there's no
misunderstanding, at least by those who will take the time to read along!)

If these are FR Enterprise licenses, then you have several tools to help you
with that. First and foremost, there is the Enterprise Dashboard (ED), which
appears inside every FR Enterprise instance. You could pick any one of them
(as of FR 4, it would be best to pick the FRAM instance) to configure that
instance's ED to "watch" all the other instances.

That would present a single unified interface to watch all the instances.
The ED feature adds as well the ability to group the watched servers,
however you want, such as logically (production vs test, or CF8 vs CF9,
etc.), or physically (local vs remote, physical vs virtual, etc.) And when
you view a group, you are seeing an aggregate depiction of the status of all
the instances in that group, from which you can drill down to see a
compressed view of the status of each server. (And from there, you can click
on any instance to jump to the "full" FR interface for that instance.)

Once you've done configured one of your FR Enterprise instances to have an
ED watching other instances, you can then also optionally use either the AIR
Enterprise Dashboard, or the new IOS Enterprise Dashboard, which allow you
to view that ED (that you configured above) either from your desktop
(outside the browser) with the AIR ED, or on your iphone/ipad with the IOS
ED.

To be clear, these 2 apps are configured to look at some one ED that's been
configured on the server, and that one ED on the server is what's been
configured to look at all the other FR Enterprise instances you have.

And though I've said it a couple times, let me make sure the point is not
missed by anyone reading this: these EDs do only work to watch FR Enterprise
instances, not FR Standard instances. This is in fact one of the significant
differentiators for the FR Enterprise edition (that it can be monitored from
one or more other FR Enterprise instance EDs).

If you have only FR Standard, there is no means by which to do such
cross-server monitoring built-in. I'll let the FR guys indicate if some
aspect of the API can be called remotely. Even if it could, there is really
a lot that such a tool would need to do, beyond just "pinging the server" to
be monitored. The ED shows nearly all the same info as the System Metrics
page within a given instance. There's no API that would expose all of that
info. Then there's the mechanisms that the ED offers to do email
notifications if a monitored server stops responding, and so on. Again,
these are the things that make the Enterprise edition of FR worth the extra
money (and it's not much.) There are upgrade offers, though, to convert from
FR Standard to Enterprise.

Lastly, so there's no confusion (again, from anyone reading this), when I
refer to FR Standard or Enterprise, that has nothing to do with whether the
version of CF being monitored is CF Standard or Enterprise. The two terms
used by the two tools have no connection to each other at all .

Hope that's helpful.

/charlie

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[Darren Pywell]

Hi,

Thanks Charlie for the very comprehensive answer!

We are also working on an Android version of the ED and some cool new
features. We hope to have that those out near the start of 2012.

Cheers,
Darren

On Dec 21, 9:04 pm, "charlie arehart" <charlie_li...@carehart.org>
wrote:

[charlie arehart]

Thanks for the kind regards, Darren. And I'll take it as another compliment
that you didn't have more to add. :-)

BTW, I noticed that I made a little grammatical flub:

"Once you've done configured one of your FR Enterprise instances.."

But then again, both Tim and I are live in Georgia, so I'm sure "he done
understood" me. :-) The funny thing is that neither of us have southern
accents (and he's even further south in the state).

Tim, hope the info may have helped. Do let us know how you get on or if you
have followup questions.

[Tim Cunningham]

Thanks Charlie!

I was afraid that was the answer. We have a mish-mash of licenses
most of them standard edition. Updating them all to ED is not really
an option right now. All I really would like is a page with icon
representations of each server and a color to represent "health" If
FR can't do that, I guess I can accomplish similar by writing some
SNMP or Nagios Plugins.

Thanks,

Tim

On Dec 21, 7:43 pm, "charlie arehart" <charlie_li...@carehart.org>

[charlie arehart]

Yep, understood. That said, you may want to talk to the FR folks to see if
they may offer a deal for upgrading such a large number (email
sa...@fusion-reactor.com).

But yes, you could certainly create something that just does that sort of
check. There are in fact multiple tools of that sort out there, some of
which may do the sort of multiserver presentation of status on a single
page. FWIW, I have a category of my CF411 site, "Web Site Uptime Monitoring
Tools", Web Site Uptime Monitoring Tools. I never checked (and don't
indicate) which may support such a single-page view of many servers, but I'm
sure among them some does.

And indeed, while those focus (generally) on making checks from outside your
environment (which is valuable), I realize you may be happy (or even need) a
way to check them only from inside. Besides the possibility that some of
those on that list may suffice, I'll note that part of what you want may be
served by any of a number of other tools that fit the broader category of
"Monitoring Tools/Services", and indeed that subcat above is within that
larger category, where I offer many others, at http://www.cf411.com/mon.
Among those, check out "Application Monitoring Tools" and "System Monitoring
Tools".

Finally, you mention Nagios, and some may know that there is in fact a
Nagios plugin for FR, but note that it too only works with FR Enterprise:

http://www.fusion-reactor.com/community/developers/autodev_detailed.cfm?arti
cle=FRS-233

All that said, there may well still be something within FR that you can call
as "the thing to check how CF is doing", though of course you could also
just have your monitor tool call something else in your own application.

Hope some of that helps.

/charlie

> -----Original Message-----
> From: fusion...@googlegroups.com
> [mailto:fusion...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Tim Cunningham
> Sent: Thursday, December 22, 2011 10:21 AM
> To: FusionReactor
> Subject: [fusionreactor] Re: Consolidating multiple fusion reactors
>