What needs improvement with ITRS Geneos?

Speaking about room for improvement, ITRS Geneos is not on the cloud at a time when everyone is moving to the cloud. I definitely know that they have some monitoring extensions or plug-ins for the cloud, but it needs to be explored more, especially for the different features and whatever we have in different cloud areas. So we need more things available for the cloud as well. Cloud already has features that make it stable. So, if they make the solution available on the cloud, then it will be stable.

Their cloud monitoring solution needs to be improved. I have already given them the feedback that it's not capable of meeting the latest technology needs. It's built like proprietary software. I can't expose the data to ITRS, and similarly, ITRS can't expose the data to the outside world. They have created a boundary. It's a bit binding solution. In the modern world, people like to be able to expose the data to do whatever they want. They can query the data, send it, or pull it. ITRS needs to provide more in terms of the API offering. They have documentation, but they can improve the documentation and provide videos to show how to do monitoring configuration or deployment.

ITRS Geneos cloud monitoring is very weak and can use improvement. I have been exploring other monitoring tools for the cloud space," but ITRS needs to look into it because the way it is being implemented or it is available at this moment is too complex to use. I'm able to manage my stakeholder expectations until the cloud introduction. After the cloud introduction, I see there is a gap that ITRS cannot fit into, and I'm looking for some custom stories. ITRS needs to focus on the cloud space.

Currently, the most valuable thing for an individual is a mobile device. Since that is where people are currently tracking everything, we have multiple applications or apps that are for various products. I would like ITRS Geneos to develop an app, where instead of going to specific login terminals or logging into laptops or desktops to check alerts, we can have visibility in the app itself. Using the ITRS Geneos app, we could see the error message during our travels or wherever we are. I would like to see the capacity of messages for forecasting increased. Since the NSE is the number one derivative stock exchange in the work for three consecutive years, the number of messages is important. We use the capacity planner in ITRS to forecast our data needs for the next two months. The planner is important because the volume of data we produce is becoming more and more volatile compared to when we first started using ITRS Geneos in 2014.

Geneos' application monitoring could be improved a lot. Products like AppDynamics and Dynatrace provide the process of thread-level monitoring, but Geneos lacks these capabilities. I rate Geneos six out of 10 for data collection because it isn't lightweight compared to AppDynamics and Dynatrace. The solution's specialty is its dashboards, and I feel like it hasn't developed this functionality much over the past nine years. The dashboard is robust and excellent, but the capabilities could be updated.

A lot of solutions now use AI to predict and prevent failure. ITRS Geneos needs to evolve its prediction and prevention capabilities, as AI-based monitoring is becoming more important. Earlier, it was just alert-based. Most organizations look towards artificial intelligence-based monitoring solutions. Products such as Dynatrace rely more on artificial intelligence using algorithms to predict future failures, which is a plus point compared to ITRS Geneos. If the solution can use AI to monitor trends and provide analysis without having to wait for the threshold to be reached it would be very helpful. Recently, the infrastructure has been moving from bare metal or a physical server to more cloud-based infrastructure. Being an older solution, the architecture is still perfect for physical machine monitoring. However, ITRS Geneos is improving and evolving in cloud-based monitoring. But there are some specific tools that are better than ITRS Geneos in cloud-based monitoring, which are strictly cloud-based. For the solution to stay relevant in the cloud-based monitoring environment Geneos needs more plug-ins with more features. Instead of offering clients workarounds, the solution should have a cloud-based out-of-the-box version.

There is one drawback to using lightweight data collection: we lack the feature of observability based on time series, such as historical model data. This makes it difficult to view data in ITRS. ITRS needs to improve this feature. The dashboarding needs a lot of improvement. It takes a lot of manual work to get it up and running. The dashboarding also doesn't render automatically according to the screen size. For example, if we create a dashboard on a 14-inch screen and want to put it on a 55-inch TV, the dashboard doesn't automatically render. There is some misalignment. Another major feature ITRS lacks is that they don't provide a mobile app to monitor the dashboard. We have to always log in to the laptop to check the necessary details. If these two features improve, I would give the solution a ten out of ten for its ability to prevent failure. Currently, the ITRS tool is available as a binary. We do not have this particular tool as a containerized module, such as a Docker image. This makes it difficult to set up on the Kubernetes platform. I would like to have a feature for tracing on the application side added to the solution. The end user requests data from the application and we need to identify where any delays occur in order to improve application performance. Visualizing the tracing information is helpful in identifying the source of any delays.

For the last year or two, I've been asking the vendor about the mobile app. This is something that probably everyone asks when they see the tool and they see how powerful it is. If there is any mobile app for this or if there is any way this tool can be more easily accessible other than having a big client installed, it would be great. I know you can build dashboards, et cetera, but there is no quick and easy way. I should be able to download an app, log in, and see my status. That will put this product above everything else out there. I believe it's on their roadmap. Other than that, we are not looking for any features. Initially, when we started, they were just, for example, Windows compatible from a front-end console perspective, but that has evolved over time. Now, they can run on Linux, Mac, etc. So, that's great. There was a bit of pushback initially, but after that has been sorted, the next question everyone is asking is obviously being mobile. What can I do remotely? Do I have to physically log in? Do I have to open up my laptop? That's the next big thing everywhere. People sometimes just want to glance at something or have the mobile opportunity to do things.

We've also bought Datadog at an enterprise level. That solution looks really pretty. Personally, I don't like that but a lot of senior management, the non-technical guys, do like that. ITRS have started to make some major changes that we haven't taken on board yet, in the creation of dashboards and more visibility of the metrics that we collect. At the moment, that's something that's lacking, but I know they have addressed it. Still, it’s not that easy to create stuff to help with visibility and dashboarding in Geneos.

Mobile phone integration is probably not as rich as it could be. Another area where I would like to see some improvement is around visualising the environment. At the moment, drawing the estate within Geneos is a very manual process, so it would be better if there was a reusable database behind it that can link the environment to the configuration. For example, read a CMDB to provide the view of how it works together. Or, if not feasible to read the CMDB, put the effort into creating your diagram and generating a CMDB from it. This would be very valuable because App teams have to pull stuff together, to show where host A is in relationship to host B, and at the moment this is a lot of manual effort with very little reusability.

One area where there is room for improvement is the log file. I would like to be able to do a pre-run on the log files. When you are testing log files for regular expressions, it would be good to be able to do a quick check up front on that side of things before you release that into production. And more generally, there is room for improvement with the Netprobe agent performance and understanding when you need to deploy a second Netprobe versus a single Netprobe.

There is a part of the rules for monitoring alerts. I want to understand more about how to choose the samples and the requirements for the rules. That is the part that I want to understand better and get better training for.

We explored the database logging feature of Geneos ITRS and we are not using that much as of now. We are using it for a reporting type of function. We collect the trends — how many alerts we are getting — and we probably review it once in a month. But I would really like to see something from the Geneos side to set up automated reporting from ITRS. We have to send reporting to management every day. To do that we have to check the dashboard and then we have to report whether everything is fine or not. In the future, I want something, some reporting kind of feature in ITRS, where it can collect all the data and mention what is green, what is amber, and what is red in a report. That is the most important thing that I would like to see. The other area where something could be done is the scheduling part. Instead of relying on any other scheduler, it would be good if we could use an ITRS tool for scheduling our batches.

They have the Webslinger solution where you can see when something is alerting. It's a little bit cumbersome.

Some aspects of dashboarding are very proprietary and it makes it difficult, at times, to replicate your work easily. That is one area where it could really be improved. Other suggestions we have made to ITRS include: * Breadcrumb navigation within web dashboards * The addition of a nickname feature: Allow us to easily nickname any metric and then use that nickname anywhere that metric appears * Add a ticker control: Define a region of the dashboard which scrolls or flashes between a designer-determined list of metrics * Carousel and index navigation options for web dashboards * Geneos dashboard frame: We would like to see capability to add a frame of Geneos dashboard content to a web page-based dash. This would allow construction of “mixed-source” dashboards * Non-Geneos dashboard frame: We would like the capability to add a frame to a Geneos web dashboard that gets fed from a different source.

We have introduced many of the monitoring processes in the past five to six months, for the trading dashboards and the business team. We have segmented gateway servers doing the monitoring. Sometimes, if there is a lot of data coming onto the servers, we have observed a little bit of slowness on the gateway servers which are doing the ITRS dashboard monitoring. I believe the plan is that the tooling team will divide the gateway servers into two, with half of the application trading servers monitored by one gateway server and the other half monitored by another gateway server. In our organization, every department is very much dependent on ITRS. For me, the basic concern is the contingency planning for ITRS. For example, if a dashboard server stops working tomorrow there is a concern. Contingency is a concern; something needs to be planned. We have not observed any failures in the ITRS dashboards. But because of the dependency of every department on the ITRS dashboards, this is a major concern. The trading server availability is dependent upon the server availability of the dashboards.

The ITA, the post-incident analytics, could be improved. They know that. I'm sure they're working on it. That encompasses a whole facet, a whole dimension, of the product.