ALP Argus

Argus is service of the centralized monitoring and control (STsMK).

On December 6, 2016 the ALP Group company announced providing service of the centralized monitoring and control of IT infrastructure of Argus.

Service is focused on large and average retail, the government and municipal institutions, vertically integrated energy industry enterprises, the banking sector, providers of services SaaS and IaaS, small and medium-sized enterprises in the field of service of management of finance, audit, consulting, etc.

According to the statement of developers, use of Argus will help the companies to reduce losses from idle times of IT by 70-80% in a year. In projects of import substitution of STsMK "Argus" will simplify transition to software, created by domestic developers or the international community of Open Source. Also service will help to solve a problem of deficit of IT specialists of the top skills.

Possibilities of Argus

STsMK "Argus" conducts continuous condition monitoring of the IC or its separate subsystems, at the same time the analysis of the arriving data in real time, early identification of problems and development of optimal corrective actions are executed by expert team of staff of ALP Group.

As a part of such crew specialists of a different profile — administrators, systems analysts, network infrastructure, virtualization, OS, DBMS, 1C: Enterprise platform, BI systems specialists and so forth act. Thanks to high qualification and interaction of specialists of a different profile, use of the additional IT tools and knowledge bases created in ALP Group, crews are capable to diagnose practically any IT problem already at the first signs of its emergence, to quickly check candidate solutions and to online develop optimal recommendations about its elimination. These recommendations are applied at once (remotely or through a partner network of ALP Group) or transferred to IT service of the enterprise customer.

The cost of service depends on the size and complexity of IT infrastructure, on density of IT services and the number of branches of the organization: within 2 thousand - 5 thousand rubles a month for one server. It slightly increases costs for IT, but allows to save later — up to 40% for FOT and up to 70-80% on losses because of idle times of IT which managed to be prevented. The complete functionality of STsMK "Argus" is available to an Enterprise segment and averages by the size to the Russian organizations.

Tools of STsMK "Argus"

System administrators obtain from STsMK the complete information about work of the IC sections entrusted to them as usual (system magazines). At this STsMK automatically consolidates magazines of the ICs different elements, enters summary information in the single database and allows to filter events by difficult criteria, including, using full-text search. Besides, in STsMK there are means of operational data analysis, including, based on artificial intelligence. Expert system, relying on the rule set which is constantly expanded by ALP Group, it is capable to reveal in event streams difficult for detection and diagnostics of an IT problem, being "on joints" different services and sections of the IC — for example, caused by dynamic loads, etc. A system can prompt that needs to be done in this situation.

There is a user interface for IT heads. It is a dashboard (dashboard) on which in the form of intuitive visual images the status of the infrastructure facilities, nodes and IC services relating to an area of responsibility of the user is shown. The panel can be "flat" or have the hierarchical structure answering to levels of macroregions, regions, cities and groups of branches.

The operation mode intended for the organizations where prohibition on IT outsourcing works is provided in STsMK "Argus". In this case STsMK is established in the IC of the enterprise and only the customer's employees work with service.

Scenarios of application of STsMK "Argus"

STsMK "Argus" allows to solve several extremely difficult and widespread IT tasks:

• Service of the IC with very high requirements to the rate of elimination of IT problems.
• Continuous audit of the IC. It is the type of IT audit allowing to monitor in real time work of systems and services at the moments of "peak" loadings and also at introduction of large-scale changes in the IC.
• Increase in efficiency of IT service without transfer of service of the IC to outsourcing.
• Tracking of operation of the crucial equipment (for example, a retail store equipment or cash registers at the enterprises of retail).

Systems and components

In STsMK "Argus" products with an open program code, own developments of Competence Center on import substitution and Open Source ALP Group are applied:

• The monitoring system of Zabbix (version 3.0) is the central link of a system of collecting, storage and processing of primary information providing aggregation of data, processing of threshold values, inventory of the equipment, forecasting of changes on key indicators.
• The free software of the class middleware focused on transmission of messages, RabbitMQ serves as the data exchange bus between the STsMK components: agents of monitoring, services of storage and processing of the structured and unstructured data, the Service Desk system, service of sending notifications, etc. Allows to adapt and develop quickly the STsMK platform, adding necessary components without change of architecture and also provides ability to integrate practically with any available customer's ICs.
• Argus Agent and Zabbix Agent are responsible for automatic detection and setup of objects of monitoring, collecting of primary data and their transfer to a monitoring system. Provide no-touch deployment, updating and configuration management of agents of monitoring.
• Software of Graylog and Elastic Search provide collecting, processing and storage of unstructured data and magazines of applications, full-text search and also filtering and normalization, and further routing of the received messages, extraction of additional fields, adding of calculated fields, determination of a context, a binding of geodata, etc.
• Nginx is the application server providing balancing of loading for the STsMK components.
• The OS Alt Server and CentOS — basic operation systems for the STsMK components.
• Own developments of ALP Group:
  • visualization tools of information on IT problems on the interactive map of the Russian Federation;
  • instruments of deep monitoring HyperV and MS SQL;
  • services necessary for control of observance by IT service of the customer of recommendations of task forces and best practices for setup of applications; means of unloading of engineers regarding installations and updates of agents;
  • instruments of monitoring of efficiency of use of human resources;
  • governed, settings, operation algorithms and different checks of STsMK, user interfaces for interaction with service.