CITTIO Contributes the First and Only DMTF-Based Instrumentation for Cloud Monitoring

CITTIO®, the innovation leader in automated network and systems monitoring software, announces today the release of project Zeppelin, the first open source cloud management and monitoring agent designed to address the challenges of cloud infrastructure and applications' monitoring. Project Zeppelin is the cornerstone of CITTIO's contribution toward accelerating cloud technology adoption by corporate IT and is positioned as a catalyst for management standardization. It is the first step in CITTIO's vision to provide enterprise application owners as well as cloud operators the tools they need for selecting, benchmarking and monitoring the most suitable applications and systems for cloud computing.

While the changes in application and infrastructure architectures promise to be dramatic, cloud computing brings in new risks to the command and control structures of today's IT operations and requires a dramatic evolution in the capabilities of existing network and systems management solutions.

First, given the lack of appropriate instrumentation, managing and metering usage at both the cloud operator and application user ends are still primitive or non-existent. The SLAs defined by cloud operators mostly depend on basic home-grown management applications and are not auditable and verifiable by independent monitoring.

Second, new metrics need to be created to accurately monitor cloud characteristics of elasticity and resource availability. To best deliver elasticity, cloud computing infrastructures leverage virtualized systems, server and network abstraction as well as geographic load balancing and dynamic provisioning. In this context, the notion of consumption of 'fixed' resources may not always apply as capacity becomes variable -- or elastic -- potentially rendering traditional metrics like "CPU or Memory utilization" unfit for cloud computing. Furthermore, there is a need to measure the "Availability to Promise" (ATP) of the resources assigned by the cloud system as well as the consistency of that availability over time.

Third, most existing system management solutions continue to rely either on proprietary agent technology or SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) for their performance metric collection today and simply lack the ability to transfer data securely over public networks, making them unfit for cloud monitoring. Finally new frameworks that support parallelization across tens to potentially thousands of nodes have been made available and affordable through cloud computing yet offer limited or no standard monitoring instrumentation to speak of.

To address many of these challenges, CITTIO has launched an open source community development initiative under Project Zeppelin. Zeppelin provides detailed asset, performance, auditing, benchmarking and usage metering information of cloud and datacenter infrastructure and applications. It can be easily deployed remotely while its data can be securely accessed across the public Internet based on the industry standard WBEM/CIM-XML and WS-Management interfaces. WS-Management and CIM-XML are rich DMTF standards, ideal for the management of virtualized environments and cloud computing.

Zeppelin delivers deep and broad instrumentation for hardware, operating system and application status and performance. This includes Linux, Citrix XenServer(TM) through Project Kensho(1), and VMware. It also provides a large number of industry-based micro benchmarks through lmbench.

"Project Kensho is a critical Citrix effort in support of our vision for virtualization and cloud interoperability," said Simon Crosby, CTO, Virtualization and Management Division, Citrix Systems. "Within days of our open source release, the CITTIO team demonstrated a complete cloud monitoring solution for XenServer built using Zeppelin and the Kensho tools, together with a powerful chargeback utility to enable a service provider to bill per VM hour. We are pleased with CITTIO's leverage of Kensho to help our customers transform static datacenters into dynamic 'delivery centers' for the best performance, security, cost savings and business agility."

Project Zeppelin offers the following key features aimed at monitoring and managing a broad range of IT infrastructure components and technologies:

--  Only project that supports XenServer, VMware, Linux and cloud
    benchmarks in one small footprint agent with a single installer
--  Only available WS-MAN/CIM-XML platform for the cloud
--  Only usage metering platform that allows usage stats to be collected
    from the bare metal up through the operating system to the virtualization
    platform
--  Available in open source license

Technically, Zeppelin incorporates both SFCB -- CIM Object Manager (CIMOM) server for resource-constrained and embedded environments and Openwsman -- Web Services Management agent for full WS-Man protocol. Zeppelin includes a rich set of standard Linux management instrumentation including base OS, event log analysis, file system and volume management, network, NFS and RPM and much more. On the virtualization front, Zeppelin provides deep instrumentation for Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V via Project Kensho and for VMware through its own CIM implementation. It also supports infrastructure performance benchmarking and distributed computing instrumentation. Instrumentation is delivered via the means of "providers" which can be selected in and out by the user.