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RiverMuse Architecture
Breakthrough Event and Fault Management for the New IT
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RiverMuse Architecture
Breakthrough Event and Fault Management for the New IT
These outdated legacy platforms may have once provided IT organizations with adequate functionality. They are,
however, quite demonstrably inadequate for the challenges now being faced by IT organizations. This is because:
They can’t support the continuous change that characterizes today’s networks. When legacy management
platforms were conceived, IT environments were relatively static. Today, in stark contrast, they are
highly dynamic. IT organizations are constantly modifying infrastructure to respond to changing business
requirements. Virtualization further contributes to this fluidity by allowing server instances to be moved, added,
and deleted with just a few keystrokes. SOA, cloud computing, and other adaptive technologies produce a
similar effect by allowing IT to implement resources with unprecedented flexibility. IT organizations simply
can’t update the business logic within their legacy management platforms quickly enough to keep pace with
this incessant change.
They leave critical IT services vulnerable to blind spots and silent failures. As business performance has
become increasingly dependent on IT services, legacy fault management architectures have actually left IT
more vulnerable to blind spots and silent failures than ever. Much of this vulnerability is again due to the
fact that legacy platforms can’t keep up with the pace of change in the IT environment. Another reason is
that these platforms don’t provide any means of maintaining the integrity of event message content when
business logic is changed. When this event message content is lost or corrupted by changes in business
logic, IT staff can wind up with zero visibility into potentially critical infrastructure problems.
They fail to sufficiently insulate IT staffs from the size and complexity of IT infrastructure. The sheer size,
complexity, heterogeneity, and interdependencies of IT infrastructure are straining the ability of IT to prevent
service interruptions, fix problems, and respond to issues according to business impact. Legacy platforms
require IT staffs to invest a tremendous amount of time and energy into the definition and management of the
business rules that allow them to manage by exception—that is, to extract legitimate alerts and impending
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issues from the hundreds of thousands of events that the computing environment generates every day. They
still lack the consistency, automation, and model integrity necessary to streamline event management and
align it with the current state of the business.
They force IT departments to work in isolation from each other. While IT professionals in different companies
may be able to share management insights and best practices at a high level through online forums and
industry associations, they are unable to exchange actual work product and intellectual property. Given
the new and extraordinary pressures these professionals now face, they could clearly benefit from a closer
collaboration with their peers that would eliminate the need for each company’s IT staff to constantly “re-
invent the wheel.” Unfortunately, because vendors of legacy management architectures operate under a
proprietary model, they offer no practical way for the management community to engage in such collaborative
exchanges. This results in an inefficient dependency on trial and error, unnecessary expenditures of time and
money, and chronically delayed time-to-benefit.
They cost too much. Inertia and limited competition in the network management market have led to exorbitant
pricing for legacy platforms. Service and support for these platforms has driven up the cost even further. IT
organizations, however, are no longer in a position to allocate an inordinate percentage of their budgets and
staff resources to the safeguarding of service levels. These resources are too limited, and it has become a
strategic imperative to allocate a larger proportion of them to the kind of innovation that can directly advance
the interests of the business. So, while it may have been acceptable in the past for network management to
consume a disproportionate amount of time and money, this is no longer the case.
Simply put, the useful life of legacy management architectures is now at an end. IT organizations that
continue to use platforms with these architectures will put their companies at a competitive disadvantage as
they overspend on management while failing to optimize delivery of critical services to internal and external
constituencies. It is thus essential that IT implement a new architecture that can effectively support service
level optimization in a world of constant change, extreme complexity, and constrained resources.
RiverMuse Architecture
RiverMuse’s breakthrough event-and-fault management architecture is specifically designed from the ground
up to address the issues of change, complexity, collaboration, and cost—ensuring that IT can continually
maintain the infrastructure visibility necessary to optimize service levels.
RiverMuse’s architecture preserves content integrity by separating management data into two separate tiers.
The Events tier stores all original content received from the network—including SNMP traps, demand poll
results, syslogs, Windows Messages, etc. The Alerts tier stores all modified content (or “states”) that results
from the application of business rules or other operational logic to the original Event content.
RiverMuse natively uses a MySQL database, and in the future may be used with other popular database
management systems. All replication, federation, and acceleration are performed within the database itself.
In addition to using a two-tier data model, the RiverMuse platform further ensures content integrity by
protecting all data in both tiers from subsequent inputs. Alert data created by additive business logic—such
as automation and conditioning—is also retained and protected from subsequent changes. This ensures that
all existing business logic will continue to work on all existing data, even as multiple successive changes
occur in both the enterprise environment and in the management system itself.
In legacy platforms, new business logic generally replaces existing logic. This can make it difficult to “roll
back” rules and/or perform forensics on previous network states—which, in turn, can have a chilling effect
on the introduction of new business logic that may be needed to optimally manage service levels. RiverMuse
addresses this problem by protecting existing business logic. New logic can therefore be freely added and
applied as required—because the risk of permanently losing or corrupting previous logic is fully mitigated.
With RiverMuse, on the other hand, all automations, transpositions, enrichments, and correlation rules are
applied to a common service layer using a single business logic configuration language based on pure
ANSI SQL. This radically simplifies customization of the environment and greatly streamlines change
management—since it is much easier to document all actions performed on a system when those actions are
performed in one place in a common manner.
RiverMuse solves this problem by allowing business logic to be written using “dynamic variables” that are
linked to external sources such as CMDBs or change management tools. When infrastructure changes occur,
they can thus be automatically reflected in the operative logical statement. This adaptable business logic
enables IT organizations to reap the benefits of adaptive infrastructure without sacrificing the day-to-day
manageability of the enterprise environment.
RiverMuse will radically accelerate management of new networked resources by automatically instantiating
business logic for those resources as soon as they are identified in any incoming management data. RiverMuse
users will have the option either to activate this logic without any operator intervention or to immediately
present it to an operator for approval. Either way, this automatic “management by presence” will enable IT to
respond to infrastructure change much more nimbly than legacy fault management architectures.
RiverMuse’s architecture is designed to provide a powerful alternative to this closed, inefficient model by
enabling business logic to be reused internally throughout the organization—and even transported between
organizations if customers choose to do so. A class-based abstraction layer allows business logic to
be anonymously uncoupled from any originating instance and shared with any other RiverMuse user or
organization—where it can then be plugged into the local management environment and applied to the
same class of resource. RiverMuse will maintain all publicly available business logic in a secure, searchable
repository that all registered users can access via the web.
RiverMuse offers a superior architectural approach by providing an open monitoring layer that handles both
passive data (SNMP traps, Windows Event Log, WMI, UNIX and Cisco syslog messages, etc.) and data gleaned
from the platform’s native active, policy-based polling engine. Passive data can also be imported into the
platform via an XML/SOAP API, making it easy to integrate other management data sources. An intelligent data
management mechanism mediates all incoming data—handling tasks such as de-duplication, registering all
events, and determining whether data should escalate to the alert tier of the database. All imported and
native content (both passive and polled) is thus uniformly time-stamped and kept in one place, where its
integrity is protected and it always remains available for compliance, analytics, and forensics.
Multi-tenancy architecture
Deployment of legacy management platforms has historically been monolithic. An organization deploys the
platform to manage its infrastructure across the enterprise. Responsibilities and workflows may be divvied
up to different users and classes of users as necessary from an operational perspective, but the deployment
remains inherently that of a single business entity.
This type of deployment does not make sense for constituencies such as managed service providers, large
enterprise with a shared service model, and cloud providers that need to give their customers secure,
independent visibility into discretely segmented resource territories. RiverMuse has therefore been designed
to intrinsically support multi-tenant deployment. Mediation, for example, can be bounded and distributed on
a per-tenant basis to provide customer-centric views of alerts and actions. This allows management services
to be appropriately tailored to a variety of current and emerging business models.
RiverMuse provides a variety of other features and functionality that streamline IT operations by making
ownership of management technology far less cumbersome than has been the case with legacy platforms.
These include:
• DIY feature development. RiverMuse uniquely enables IT organizations and their partners to develop additional
functionality for the platform. This is a compelling alternative to legacy platforms that keep customers waiting
years before providing needed new capabilities—and that often fail to deliver such capabilities at all.
• Self-updating platform. Using RPM Package Manager and YUM, RiverMuse automatically prompts users when
new or updated components of the platform become available. This significantly eases platform maintenance.
• Automated health checks. RiverMuse continually monitors all platform components, alerting operators
immediately to any state change. As new platform components are added, they are automatically registered with
the health check system.
With all these advantages, RiverMuse is a compelling alternative for SMBs and large enterprises alike. For
SMBs, RiverMuse offers the ability to acquire true “manager of managers” capability at a far lower cost-of-
entry than conventional platforms—and with much, much more rapid time-to-benefit. By building on this
foundation, SMBs can secure a clear growth path for their future.
For larger enterprises, RiverMuse offers significantly more effective management of complex, dynamic
infrastructure with dramatically reduced overhead—a genuine competitive advantage in today’s technology-
dependent marketplace.
In fact, with the introduction of RiverMuse, there are really no viable reasons to continue using the over-
priced, underdeveloped proprietary management platforms left over from previous decades. RiverMuse’s
breakthrough architecture makes it ideal for IT organizations looking for the best way to optimize service
levels to the business and its customers, to drive down the total cost of infrastructure ownership, and to
ensure ongoing adaptability to an incessantly evolving technology ecosystem.