I last spoke with FiveRuns, at length, back in March when Dave Wilby and I got together for a long lunch in Austin. As I’ve mentioned on the blog and to many of you, dear reader, they’re working on a hosted, Rails based (for the UI) systems management application.
Today I noticed they’ve added quite a lot more info to their site. They’ve been in stealthy mode for sometime, so any info in, relatively, a lot of info.
My History with Hosted Systems Management: PATROL Express
Back at BMC, I worked on PATROL Express, BMC’s hosted systems management platform. PATROL Express typically had a weird, almost red-headed step-child life at BMC. It started out as two products — SiteAngel and GuardianAngel — that were merged together, then merged with PATROL. The merge with PATROL moved it solidly to a behind-the-firewall model.
The marriage of the two PATROLs was re-branded as BMC Performance Manager, or BPM. Sure, it could run as a hosted service — and still does — but the primary use-case was using it as a traditional systems management application. There was a sort of architectural fork, if you will.
The other end of the PATROL Express fork is now in the charge of BMC’s On Demand/Managed Services silo. There’s a podcast on that topic available.
I mention this context because it’ll be both interesting and important to compare PATROL Express’s successes and failures to FiveRun’s offering. In an open source world, SaaS is one viable strategy to pay the bills, so FiveRuns go at it will be education for everyone in the space, especially The Big 4.
More Info on FiveRuns
I’m a fan of web applications, more generally Software as a Service. So, PATROL Express was always fascinating to me. As you can imagine, other hosted systems management platforms are equally interesting. Such as FiveRuns.
So, let’s take a look at what their website says about them at the moment. They’re still in pseudo-stealth mode, so you can only sign up for a beta and dig around on the ‘net and in email to figure out what they do.
As such, the below is all wild speculation based solely on the website, the FAQ and Learn teaser pages in particular. Dave has promised to give me a demo, if not a beta account, sometime soon, after which I’ll report back with less wild speculation ;>
Simplicity and Lessconfig
The reoccurring theme is to err on the side of simplicity and having less crap. I know Dave, and thus, FiveRuns, acutely understands the pile of information out there and wants to simplify things. A lot of people give lip service to simplifying piles of data, but few people deliver in an earth shattering way. It’s too easy to just give up on analyzing out the top 10-15 or so metrics and throwing away the 100’s of others. Throwing away data is painful.
And, here’s a note from Dave Rosenberg during the MySQL Users Conference where FiveRuns demo’ed:
The complexity is removed because the software auto-finds and configures -basically you drop in, deploy and get going quickly.
We’ll see what FiveRuns manages to do and how customers like it. In theory, less is better in systems management, but I’m not sure we’ve seen that road tested on a large scale.
Suggestions
“Community knowledge base supports you through problem resolution.”
And, again from Dave Rosenberg:
The other side of this is that FiveRuns aggregate knowledge-base articles relating to similar subject matter. This knowledge base aggregates information that is generic and and specific to your organizations infrastructure.
The “community” part sounds like Collaborative Systems Management, where users and code can look at the vast pool of metrics and solutions, across intranets. For example, when you get an alert monitoring Oracle, “suggestions” could tell you, “7 times out of 10, when this happened, an admin did this…” Or, you could do things like get the communities best guess at which thresholds to use for certain environments; the “Auto Baseline” screenshot seems to hint at this, but, again, I’m just wildly speculating.
Real collaborative systems management can’t be done unless you pump the data into the cloud. More importantly, it will be a huge differentiator between traditional systems management platforms and new platforms.
Hosted
It goes without saying that it’s hosted. This means that FiveRuns will run a web site that you log into to see and configure all of your systems management stuff. You won’t need to install a central “portal” behind your firewall. You, of course, have to install software behind your firewall, hopefully small and lightweight agents, that collect data from your machines and send them up to the portal on the public internet.
Agent vs. Agentless
“A simple FiveRuns SmartClient is installed on each system you want to monitor.”
The Agent vs. Agentless debate is great inside baseball for systems management wonks. Indeed, I’ve come out swingin’ on the topic more than once.
In truth, whether you’re agent or agentless matters less than the total effect in terms of maintenance and bandwidth your collection mechanism has. FiveRuns is taking an agent approach, but they’re talking to talk about being light-weight enough and auto-update enough for it to be a moot point in The Great Debate. We’ll have to see how the walk is.
Monitoring Interval
“[T]he shortest interval is every 5 minutes.”
A 5 minute reporting interval means that you may have to wait up to 5 minutes before getting data about your system. Which means that if you freak out about getting notified about problematic events rightfrickin’away then FiveRuns may not be for you.
But, if you’re one of the rightfrickin’away people, I’d suggest looking at the requirements for your monitoring again. Sure, there are domains where that matters, but chances are, you’re not in them. Even if you are in them, the TCO for having a light weight system for the majority of the system that can lag 5 minutes, and then a heavy weight system that’s more real-time-ish would probably be better TCO. That division is usually not even 80/20, and more often 95/5.
P2P Agents
“Only one FiveRuns SmartClient per location requires access to the Internet, acting as a proxy for all the other installed SmartClients, sending the data back to the FiveRuns host. The proxy is never a single point of failure. Any number of FiveRuns SmartClients can be configured to act as proxies, providing high availability failover.”
From a dork angle, this is interesting. It’s the kind of thing systems management code-monkies always want to do, but end up getting assigned to do something enterprisey instead…like dashboards ;>
Data Retention
FiveRuns stores 35 days of detailed data for every system you are monitoring. After that time, it is rolled up into summaries for performance and availability trend analysis.
This means that you will see data points in 5 minute intervals for the past 35 days. They don’t specify what the summarization interval is: popular picks are hourly and daily. Weekly is almost useless.
I guarandamntee it that one of the the top 3 questions people will ask FiveRuns is to extend the amount of “raw data” they can keep. Brandon can back me up on this one ;> They’ll probably waggle regulations and governance in front of FiveRuns, and other wild use-cases. Again, if you think you need more than 35, let along 10, days of data, you probably don’t. But hey, I get all excited about SNMP Agents, so I hear you, brother.
Open Source
Part of FiveRun’s thing is that they’re open source. I have no idea, nor do they say, what the totality of their open sourcing will be. They already support OpenRico (an AJAX framework). My guess would be that their agent will be open source and that a simple version of their portal will be open source. What won’t be open source? The code, knowledge, and infrastructure needed to support mass amounts of data being uploaded, analyzed, alerted on, and stored by them. That’s where the value is in systems management, so that’s one of the default places to monetize.
These people use Macs
You probably won’t see OS X and Safari support in traditional systems management platforms, or even new ones. Why does it matter that people use Macs? Primarily because it means things will look pretty and that they’ll have the Mac version of unix style programming and thinking. What that means is a a topic for another time, but if you pay attention to people use TextMate as their primary “IDE,” you can get an idea for what Mac influenced unix style programming is.
More to come…
Like I said, I’ll hopefully be getting a demo sometime soon, if not a full fledged beta account. Once I get my eyes and hands on those, I’ll write up more, hopefully more detailed, notes, including pulling in the rest of the systems management world for more context.
Disclaimer: BMC is a client.
Technorati Tags: austin, fiveruns, opensource, startup, sysmgmt
A lot of people want the raw data. In the end everyone needs to create some report for something. They always want the raw data to do this. If you are in the business of SLAs then reports are your deliverables.
I am suprised they are building an agent. To me that is crazy.
Yup, we’ll see how the agent works. Of course, I’ve noticed that the technical meaning of the word agent has been changing quite a bit recently. As you and I know, all you really need is either SSH or a webserver client on the box to act as a proxy for running commands.
Meaning that an “agent” can be a lot less than we usually think of it as.