Supervision: managing the crisis, no longer suffering from it

What to do when the data center hosting the supervision that oversees it suffers an incomplete or total breakdown? First of all, considering a SaaS supervision service can be the solution: the monitoring is carried out as close as possible to the elements to be supervised, but the restitution and the follow-up are carried out on an application, web or mobile, external to the Information System, and for which an availability SLA is operational, with specialized actors mobilized to reach it.The rest of this post will therefore deal with the on premise supervision platforms

Traditionally, implementations are based on a replication / synchronization of virtual machines ensuring the service by taking advantage of the technologies inherent in any virtualization or hyper-convergence solution. Despite all the precautions taken, and the technological prowess in this area, a technical or operational problem can lead to the unavailability of supervision.

It may also happen that customers require high application availability on two data centers. This second approach implies a specific software architecture on all functional layers: user access, bidirectional communication between supervisors and the central platform, data storage, analysis. Above all, it implies very strong requirements on the data centers: dedicated inter-site link constantly available, network latency between sites less than 5ms.

The ServiceNav product offers such an architecture.

These approaches are costly, complex, and rarely implemented.

Let's be provocative: in the event of an IT disaster, what will be the priority of the Data Center manager? Ensure operational continuity of supervision, or first and foremost maintain or restore the availability of applications?

In the event of a total IT disaster, the first priority is to understand what is happening: supervision plays a crucial role in contextualizing the failure encountered, and must therefore not be unavailable.

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The ServiceNav architecture natively provides this visibility in the event of a complete or partial failure of the data center hosting the monitoring, impacting it.

The principle is the following, the implementation simple and very fast:

1. Install a supervisor in the backup data center and connect it to the ServiceNav website - 15 minutes
2. Accurately define the set of controls needed to determine the state of the nominal data center:
   • Control points on all components of the supervision
   • Control points on infrastructure components: network, storage, server, hypervision
   • The dependencies between these control points
3. Set up the local Web interface on this supervisor, allowing to visualize all the controls placed under the responsibility of this supervisor - 15 minutes

This way, in the event of an outage that impacts the central monitoring website in whole or in part, you maintain visibility of critical controls.

In detail: here.

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