Infrastructure management

Pollers

Our pollers are built to adapt to a variety of customer networks. They can monitor your largest enterprise or your smallest customer.

With easy deployment and registration using a highly secure certificate-based identification process, each poller is self-maintaining, with its configuration downloaded from your Gemmb cloud platform. There is no local configuration to maintain and back up, thus minimising the impact on your business' data protection plans.

We support common technologies such as Network Address Translation (NAT/PAT) and authenticating proxy servers, satisfying even your most security-conscious customers. In all likelihood, you won't even have to change a customer's firewall rules, as the pollers only communicate outbound to your Gemmb cloud platform using secure SSL encryption.

Our pollers do not require dedicated public IP addresses, simplifying deployment to your customers.

Pollers can be dedicated to a customer, or can be multi-tenanted, securely monitoring multiple customers integrating with service provider networking capabilities such as VRF.

You can initiate an SNMP network discovery from the pollers to discover devices and locations on the network. The discovered devices and locations can be imported into the CMDB using the web page or via the Gemmb Import Excel Add-In, which allows you to edit the discovered data before importing.

The pollers use the same CMDB that is integral to your Gemmb cloud platform, so you can be confident their data is consistent with the other components of your platform.

Using a highly distributed architecture, our platform will scale to many tens of thousands of devices, with some dependency on features enabled and the underlying hosting infrastructure.

Configuration management

The platform has a comprehensive configuration harvesting engine, with configuration change detection. Your technical team can easily compare stored configurations on the web site, allowing them to isolate configuration changes in the fault-finding process or retrieve a stored configuration for rollback or replacement on a new device.

Using the C# scripting engine, you can issue commands to the device to collect any information you need. The engine can use Telnet, SSH, or SNMP-initiated TFTP protocols.

The C# script can also be used to generate alerts and tickets, if required. For example, you can generate an alert if the collected configuration is not compliant with business policies.

Integrated into the platform's TACACS facility, the engine can authenticate to the device using a secure, randomised one-time password, avoiding the security implications of using static administrative credentials.

Our configuration harvesting engine integrates into the platform's service desk change management for automated provisioning. This brings ITIL change management to your implementation process.

Performance monitoring

Our platform's performance monitoring focuses on the three key metrics of state, threshold and statistics, providing you with a complete view of your customers' infrastructure performance.

The monitoring is vendor independent, and can collect data from any device via common protocols such as ICMP, SNMP, HTTP, NetFlow, sFlow and Syslog.

Our highly flexible SNMP polling engine automatically discovers entity hierarchies and dependencies. You can further customise the engine using powerful C# code, which is stored centralised in your Gemmb cloud platform and retrieved by the pollers as configured. It is very easy for your technical team to control and maintain this customised polling.

The platform has a built-in MIB compiler that translates SNMP trap data into a readable format. The engine can be configured to produce any alert format or severity from the traps, and has a trap storm protection mechanism to protect from incorrectly configured devices.

"Out of the box", our engine will utilise our centralised polling configuration, downloaded by each platform as Admin Packs, which are maintained and continuously updated by us. Admin Packs simplify the configuration of your Gemmb platform by giving you easy access to new capabilities.

The proprietary, adaptive Ping engine monitors device ping reliability to minimise false alerts from short-term packet loss on known unreliable networks. Utilising network topology and root cause analysis, downstream devices are marked as symptomatic to an upstream failure to alleviate noise for your operations team.

Our customisable HTTP polling engine allows you to monitor the state and response times of web sites, APIs, web applications or any other HTTP-based system. We also monitor and generate alerts on the state of SSL certificates and obsolete SSL protocol usage, maximising the certificate's availability and minimising its vulnerability.

Polling schedule

Each polling action may be individually configured to monitor and collect data only during specific times, according to a time-zone-aware, flexible schedule.

Service desk integrated

The performance monitoring engine is fully integrated with the platform's service desk component, providing your support team a full view of your customers' infrastructure directly from the tickets. Alerts generated in the platform are analysed, correlated and assigned to tickets automatically. Each ticket instantly provides a context-aware view of the infrastructure monitoring.