Supported Technologies

Over 75 supported technologies. Right out of the box.

Don't you hate it when you buy a battery-operated toy that comes without batteries? We do too. That's why we ship over 75 ready-to-run resource plugins with every copy of HQ. Hyperic HQ plugins are designed to interact with the APIs and monitoring mechanisms used by the vendor's own management and administration tools. This guarantees that the HQ can manage a resource as efficiently as any tool provided by the resource vendor.

Web platform expertise: LAMP, Java, and J2EE applications require specialized, cohesive metric collection – so you can correlate application performance up and down the stack. Hyperic HQ gives you visibility into all the technologies that matter in Web application environments – operating systems, Web servers, application servers, databases and virtualization.

Zero-touch systems management: Built-in plugins make HQ special. With many "roll your own" system management tools, you have to build custom plugins to actually collect the metrics you need. Hyperic disapproves. For truly esoteric monitoring requirements, custom coding may necessary. But building your own plugins for commonly-used technologies is signing up for lifestyle, not a project. (Just ask Doug McEachern, Hyperic CTO.) Plugin development is a bunch of work that's never really done, because every time a new version of JBoss (or WebLogic, or MQ, or whatever) is released, guess what? You've got work.

"White box" monitoring: What does "monitoring" mean to you? We know a product that says monitoring means knowing if a resource's condition is OK, WARNING, CRITICAL, or UNKNOWN—end of story. When Hyperic says we monitor a product, that means we're under the hood and getting greasy. The products we monitor have a lot of moving parts and HQ can keep an eye on all of them. We tell you more than "Is it working". We tell you how well it is working and why.

Tools and community support: HQ satisfies 100% of most customers' monitoring requirements. However, since the exception proves the rule, we've made HQ readily extendible. Hyperic provides base classes and a plugin development kit that you can use to build custom plugins. Before you do, though, be sure to check the Hyperic HyperFORGE site—someone else may have already done it for you. There is an active and enthusiastic HQ user community who contribute plugins, expertise, and support.

Accurate Inventory Models: Hyperic HQ's auto-discovery technology populates the inventory of hardware, software, and services based on the same terminology IT operators use to describe their environment. Each plugin defines its own inventory hierarchy that is specific to the technology it manages. For example, J2EE application servers—such as JBoss, WebLogic, and WebSphere—define a vast array of services such as JCA connection pools, Webapps, EJBs, JMS Topics, etc. Auto-discovery also enables management of clustered technology by supporting full inventory of all clustered resources across different machines.

Plugin-Defined Default Metrics: Each Hyperic HQ plugin defines a set of default metrics that are enabled as soon as the product is discovered. To facilitate quick deployment of HQ management, every product has its default metric set enabled at a reasonable interval that immediately provides the appropriate level of visibility for that product. These levels are based on best practices we've received from our customers.

For information about HQ's built-in plugins and community contributions, see HyperFORGE, the Hyperic community site.