Geneos
Geneos

Geneos Product Overview

Introduction

What is Geneos?

Geneos is the general product name for a family of system management and monitoring products. Geneos is widely deployed inside institutions in the Financial Services industry, being the global standard for many of these institutions.

Geneos was designed to address the monitoring and system management needs of critical real-time applications. The product is extremely extensible and its universal plug-ins can be configured to monitor a huge range of 3rd Party or bespoke information systems in a unified manner. In addition to this a range of system specific plug-ins are available to monitor key 3rd Party financial systems out of the box.

What can Geneos do?

The Geneos product range offers the following features:

  • A unified approach to monitoring dissimilar systems.
  • Real time, proactive system monitoring and management.
  • Flexible system rule management.
  • Intuitive and powerful user interface.
  • Hierarchical grouping of managed data to provide a "drill down" interface to fault detection.
  • Storage of management data to popular database.
  • Reporting on historical data.
  • Graphing and live updating system diagrams.
  • Live rule based alerting (email, pager alerting).
  • Interfacing to other 3rd party monitoring and trouble ticket systems.
  • Web based interface can be viewed via browsers or PDA devices.
  • Interface to external knowledge base or Wikipedia type systems.
  • Generic plug-ins can be configured to monitor many disparate systems including:
  • Hardware and OS resource monitoring
  • Process monitoring
  • Log file monitoring
  • Network monitoring
  • Plug-ins available to provide specific monitoring in key financial areas including:
  • Market Data Systems.
  • Middleware and messaging.
  • Trading Systems.
  • Database servers.
  • Latency monitoring.

Geneos Architecture

The Geneos product range revolves around a three tier architecture. The major software components of this architecture are Netprobes, Gateways, and Active Console:

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Netprobe

A Netprobe is a lightweight monitoring agent deployed on all the nodes you want to manage. Netprobes run plug-ins locally to collect data. Sampled data and updates are passed from a Netprobe to a connected Gateway. Netprobes can execute control-type functions upon receiving commands from Gateways.

Gateway

The Gateway is the 'hub' of a Geneos installation. One or more can be deployed at the same time on the same or multiple hosts. The Gateway downloads monitoring configuration to multiple Netprobes when it connects. The monitored data is collected from the Netprobes asynchronously, collated and analysed in real-time. The Gateway also adds value to system by running rules on the values and determining the severity of each part of the system based on these rules. The Gateway also performs Database logging and alert management.

Active Console

The Active Console is a GUI front-end client that can connect to multiple Gateway processes. Active Console presents monitoring and control functionality to the user.

Geneos Terminology

Term Explanation
Netprobe The netprobe is the agent responsible for collecting monitored metric from a target computer. The netprobe will receive configuration from a connected Gateway and pass Sampled data back to that Gateway. The term netprobe can be used interchangeably with the shorter 'Probe'.
Probe A shorter term for netprobe. This term is more commonly used in the context of Gateway configuration.
ManagedEntity A ManagedEntity is a term for a logical collection of managed variables that have been configured by the system administrator. A ManagedEntity may be used to represent a single host or just part of a host. For example, where a host is used to run multiple applications being managed by Geneos, each application could be set up as a separate Managed Entity. Each ManagedEntity will have its own icon in the Geneos front end.
Sampler A Sampler is a configured instance of a plug-in. It will contain the plug-in reference and all the required configuration parameters that are needed to run that plug-in.
Plug-in

A component of Geneos that is tailored to provide specific management / monitoring capability. Plug-ins are run by the netprobe. Two types of Plug-ins are available: Universal Plug-ins and Custom Plug-ins.

  • Universal Plug-ins provide general use functionality that can be used to manage a number of systems. For example, File Keyword Monitoring Plug-in or TCP/IP Connection Monitoring Plug-in.
  • Custom Plug-ins provide functionality that can be used to manage a specific system. For example, GL-ROUTER Plug-in or SYBASE Plug-in.
Dataview A Sampler presents its monitored real-time data in one or more unified table-like windows. These are called Dataviews.
ManagedVariable A ManagedVariable is the lowest level component in the Geneos system. It represents a single cell in a DataView.
DataItem A DataItem is any component in the Geneos structure, this could be a Probe, ManagedEntity, Sampler, DataView or ManagedVariable. Each DataItem will have a unique XPath name that identifies it within the system (see XPaths - User Guide for more information on XPaths). Data-items are used to allow rules to be set on components within the system.