Sun™ Management Center — A Specialist in a Specialized
World
Andrew Hillier and Andres Gomez-Rivas
First released in 1998, Sun™ Management Center is now in its third
major release with Sun Management Center 3.0. Scaling from one system to thousands
of servers, all accessible from one centralized console, Sun Management Center
3.0 is Sun’s first fully scalable Element Manager for Systems Mangaement.
This article will highlight the benefits that Sun Management Center provides for
monitoring Sun hardware and the Solaris™ Operating Environment, as well as
describe its architecture, features, and usage.
Features
The most important infrastructure change in Sun Management Center 3.0 has been the introduction of Group Operations. This feature collapses the setting of operational thresholds for hundreds of hosts into a single task. Using Group Operations, users can load modules across a hundred agents in the enterprise, or set the thresholds for alarm conditions on any monitored property on any number of hosts. The Sun Management Center Agent profile for any number of hosts can also be synchronized with that of a “reference” host, by propagating that host’s Module Configuration to the agents. This grouping infrastructure provides a point-and-click interface to these operations and replaces previous custom efforts to propagate configuration files via file transfer.
Also, the Performance Reporting Manager (PRM) add-on for Sun Management Center provides a suite of tools for graphing, analyzing, and exporting data from Sun Management Center. Utilizing the data logging capabilities of Sun Management Center agents, PRM is able to acquire the value of data properties such as system load averages, CPU utilization rates, or free disk space, over extended periods of time.
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