Pervasive Computing
The reason Pervade Software exists, and needs to exist, is because the nature of computing is changing but the nature of monitoring and reporting of computer systems is not.
Pervasive computing (also known as Ubiquitous computing) is a post-desktop model of human-computer interaction in which information processing has been thoroughly integrated into everyday life. In the course of ordinary activities, someone "using" pervasive computing engages many computational devices and systems simultaneously, and may not necessarily even be aware that they are doing so. This model is usually considered an advancement from the desktop paradigm. More formally pervasive computing is defined as "technology that fits the human environment instead of forcing humans to change their environment to use technology".
Pervasive computing manifests itself in many ways and various approaches are being taken to harness the concept for the advancements of specific technology areas. For example, pervasive computing is responsible for contactless card payment, heavily adopted and pioneered by UK technology and offered by such organizations as MasterCard, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, American Express, KeyBank, Barclays, Barclaycard, HSBC and Lloyds Banking Group. Another example is keyless car entry and ignition.
The purpose of pervasive computing is to make the latest technologies work the way users need them to rather than users operating in unintuitive and non-productive ways so that they can use technology.
Pervasive Monitoring
Pervasive Monitoring, the paradigm of Pervade Software, leverages the same principle as all other types of Pervasive Computing - that technology should be flexible enough to fit into the user's life and environment and should not require unintuitive or non-productive changes to the user's behavior in order to use the technology.
Since the earliest attempts to monitor systems, which were simple extensions of a device's ability to report on it's own availability and resource consumption, monitoring systems have been created, piecemeal, to satisfy the needs to monitor a device type, or a data type. These disparate systems have evolved to handle more devices or more data but each has clung doggedly to it's roots and built a monitoring system that is based on the original starting point.
The result is a myriad of monitoring systems that overlap each other but still only provide certain pieces of information.
So, despite all of this evolution, most enterprise organizations today will use one technology to monitor Performance/Availability Data, another to monitor Log/Security Data and yet another to audit Configuration Data. Further systems could also be used by some of the more advanced organizations to monitor Flow Data, Database Access/Activity Data, Identity & Access Data and many, many more.
Some organizations will even have multiple versions of some of these systems because not all vendors can collect from all devices. For example, one system may be a great performance monitor for network devices but may not support Windows systems. Organizations may also have different systems, being used to do the same thing, across different internal divisions, which means yet more instances of monitoring software.
This archaic approach to monitoring means that users of these systems need to:-
- Install & maintain multiple monitoring servers
- Install & maintain multiple agents on end-point devices
- Get trained on multiple systems, all with different approaches, setups and user interfaces
- Customize each system as much as possible to the environment in which it is installed
- Ensure that any firmware or operating system upgrades are supported by all installed monitoring systems
- Chase multiple vendors for support or feature requests
Pervasive Monitoring leaves this out-dated approach to monitoring behind, in the same way that pervasive computing aims to leave the old desktop paradigm behind.
Imagine a monitoring solution with a single central management console that allows users to query any network device, security device, server, workstation, PC, application, database, file or any other source of data. The data can be queried using many different query methods to ensure that data can be collected and handled in the most appropriate way. That all of this can be done with no agents being installed, or where absolutely necessary, with no more than one.
Imagine a monitoring solution that allows all data, irrespective of data type, to be analyzed in the same way and to be correlated with other data types to maximize the effectiveness of the data. The user being able to customize the analysis engine to suit their environment, not change their environment to suit the analysis engine.
Imagine a monitoring solution that lets the user create, manage and/or remove every single chart, dashboard and report in the analysis engine and therefore build a system that is absolutely perfect for their specific environment.
Imagine a monitoring solution that can be completely embedded within the user's environment by being available to the user on the widest possible range of devices (PC's/PDA/Smartphones/Servers) and to be able to alert the user via external means Email and SMS.
Finally, imagine a monitoring solution able to integrate with existing technologies in place such as ticketing/workflow systems, line of business applications or even some of those old point-solution monitoring systems.
A system with all of these attributes - that can potentially satisfy all of an organisation's monitoring and reporting needs and that can be easily configured, by the user, to fit perfectly into their environment - such a system could be considered to be a Pervasive Monitoring System
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