Features

Germain is a customizable platform that provides Real-time Alert, Monitoring, Insights and Automation and a user interface to visualize any of the data that is related to these functions.

A number of preconfigured Objects (for real-time Monitoring, Alert, Insights, Automation, Dashboard, Reporting, etc) are delivered out-of-the-box when Germain is first deployed. Any of these Objects can be customized to your needs.

Entities

DATA SOURCE

A Data Source can be a software or hardware (e.g. a file, a browser, a server, an application, a database, a network switch, etc)

KPI

Key Performance Indicator, a quantifiable measure used to evaluate the success of a process, function, user, application, etc. in meeting objectives for performance.

SLA

A Service-Level Agreement defines the level of service expected by an organization.

ACTION 

An Action is an automated transaction intended to be used for proactive issue detection, automatic reporting and alerting, automatic resolution e.g an email, synthetic user login, web service call, a sql execution, etc

PORTLET

A Portlet represents a portion of the Germain Dashboard and is KPIs driven.

DASHBOARD

A Dashboard is part of the Germain Workspace also known as "User Interface". Dashboard consists of one or many Portlets and is visible to one or many Users and Teams. More details here.

REPORT

A Report is a document in either PDF, CSV, HTML format and either automatically or manually produced by Germain and its Users.

Relationships

DATA SOURCE > KPI > SLA > ACTION

KPI > PORTLET > DASHBOARD
">" : means in this context "can be in/have one or many"

A KPI defines what data is to be tracked by the monitoring system. When planning a new deployment, one of the first tasks is to define the list of the KPIs that will be monitored by the system. KPIs consume AA Units which have a Type, Category, and Name.

AA Unit Type

Events

Events are things of interest that happen in the monitored system but that don't have associated values. Examples of events are errors and crashes.

Availability

Availability AA Units define whether a resource is available or not. Examples of availability are server or application component or url availability.

Metrics

Metrics are AA Units that capture a value related to some aspect of the monitored system. Metrics can be aggregated by either summing or averaging. Examples of metrics are server Core and memory consumption, the number of active users, or application throughput.

Latency

Latency is a special case of of metric that applies specifically to the network latency between two systems. These are treated separately because unlike all other AA Units that can be associated with one and only one system, latency is associated with two systems, a source and destination.

Transactions

Transactions are any AA Units that captures a time duration. Examples of transactions are a user click, a database query execution, or a back-end service request.

Processing

When a KPI specifies AA Units that apply, it do so in this order:

  • Type Only - Applies to all dataponts of a given type. Rarely used but can be handy in certain cases, e.g. overall network latency across all defined network branches.

  • Type and Category - Only the subset of AA Units with the specified type and category.

  • Type, Category and Name – Only the subset of AA Units that match all 3 attributes.