CopperEgg updates real-time monitoring for server processes

If you’re interested in real-time monitoring of your server processes and seeing the overall condition of your Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X servers from a single console, you might want to take a look at the latest SaaS offering from CopperEgg, which just announced the updated version of RevealCloud 3.

CopperEgg’s RevealCloud software leverages rapid deployment; a highly distributed data collection model; the extreme speed and scalability of a NoSQL schema-free database; and real-time visualization with click-through analytics to provide a modern, purpose-built cloud monitoring solution. The company says it differentiates itself from legacy performance monitoring tools that conduct polling and performance updates every 1 to 5 minutes, thereby missing valuable data in the process. Instead, RevealCloud records, analyzes, and delivers updates of critical operating and performance metrics every few seconds, and it does so across many cloud instances at the same time.

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RevealCloud is a SaaS-based server monitoring service that provides a detailed, unified view of all the servers running across both public and private clouds operating on either virtual or physical environments.

With RevealCloud 3, real-time data is displayed for all system processes, CPUs, network interfaces, memory, disk I/O, and more. CopperEgg also claims support for a wide breadth of cloud environments, including Amazon EC2, Rackspace, Windows Azure, and SoftLayer, to name a few. Additionally, it offers server monitoring for Hyper-V, Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD operating systems.

With the latest release of RevealCloud, CopperEgg delivers a number of new features, such as support for thousands of simultaneous nodes across any deployment model, an enhanced at-a-glance user interface, additional disk I/O information, and detailed breakdowns of I/O usage per disk, CPU usage, and individual network interface activity.

Perhaps the most important new feature found in RevealCloud 3 is the support for real-time process monitoring. This key feature had been in high demand with existing customers and could be the game changer for CopperEgg. This feature was best described by the company’s COO, Eric Anderson, who dubbed the historical process view as “top on steroids.”

Process monitoring with RevealCloud 3 is an essential component to help make sure that your servers are healthy. Here are three ways in which the company claims process monitoring can help:

1. If a system is running hot with regard to CPU or memory, you can easily identify which process is causing the problem and determine if that process needs to be stopped or restarted.
2. You can determine more easily if an issue is caused by two or more processes or jobs colliding with one another while running at the same time. This might cause a higher than expected load on the system, thereby extending the combined runtime of the jobs as opposed to if the jobs ran independently at different times. As an example, think about what might happen if you run an antivirus scan while kicking off a backup.
3. If your environment is fully capable of taking advantage of multiple CPUs, RevealCloud provides added visibility to determine if a process or job is written to take advantage of multiple CPUs. If this was not visible, a misconfiguration might cause a job to take longer to execute than expected. On the other hand, it could verify that a job uses only one CPU when in fact it could be using many.

When asked about the new process monitoring feature, Ben Weatherman, co-founder of Ordoro stated, “We are very pleased with the addition of real-time process monitoring in RevealCloud.” He added, “Previously, RevealCloud could tell us that memory consumption was running high. Now with process monitoring we have instant insight into what process is consuming memory, which even some of our nontechnical folks have used to troubleshoot a customer issue.”

CopperEgg is offering a full-feature version of its RevealCloud system monitoring software for free when used with up to two systems under management. Beyond that, the company is offering a pay-per-use pricing scheme where you are charged for only the time your systems are monitored. How’s that for interesting?

This article, “CopperEgg updates real-time monitoring for server processes,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.