ALP Argus

Argus is a centralized monitoring and control service.

On December 6, 2016, ALP Group announced the provision of a centralized monitoring and control service for Argus IT infrastructure.

The service is focused on large and medium-sized retail, state and municipal structures, vertically integrated enterprises of the fuel and energy complex, the banking sector, service providers SaaS and IaaS, small and medium-sized enterprises in the field of financial management, audit, consulting services, etc.

According to the developers, the use of Argus will help companies reduce losses from IT downtime by 70-80% per year. In import substitution projects, ShMK Argus will simplify the transition to software created by domestic developers or the international community Open Source. The service will also help solve the problem of a shortage of highly qualified IT specialists.

Argus Opportunities

SSC Argus continuously monitors the state of the IE or its individual subsystems, while the analysis of incoming data in real time, early identification of problems and the development of optimal corrective actions is carried out by an expert team of ALP Group employees.

This team includes specialists of various profiles - administrators, system analysts, specialists in network infrastructure, virtualization, OS, DBMS, 1C: Enterprise platform, BI systems, etc. Thanks to the high qualification and interaction of specialists of different profiles, the use of additional IT tools and knowledge bases created in the ALP Group, teams are able to diagnose almost any IT problem at the first sign of its occurrence, quickly check solutions and online develop optimal recommendations for its elimination. These recommendations are applied immediately (remotely or through the ALP Group partner network) or transmitted to the IT service of the customer enterprise.

The cost of the service depends on the size and complexity of the IT infrastructure, the density of IT services and the number of branches of the organization: within 2 thousand - 5 thousand rubles. per month per server. This slightly increases IT costs, but later saves - up to 40% on PHY and up to 70-80% on losses due to IT downtime that were prevented. The full functionality of SSC Argus is available to the Enterprise segment and medium-sized Russian organizations.

Tools of ShMK "Argus"

System administrators receive full information from the SCMK about the operation of the IE sections entrusted to them in the usual form (system logs). At the same time, the SCS automatically consolidates the logs of various IE elements, enters summary information into a single database and allows you to filter events by complex criteria, including using full-text search. In addition, the SCMK has means of operational data analysis, including those based on artificial intelligence. The expert system, relying on the constantly expanding ALP Group set of rules, is able to identify complex IT problems for detection and diagnosis in event flows that are "at the junctions" of different services and IP sites - for example, caused by dynamic loads, etc. The system can tell you what to do in this situation.

There is a user interface for IT managers. This is an information panel (dashboard), which shows the state of infrastructure objects, nodes and IS services related to the user's area of ​ ​ responsibility in the form of intuitive visual images. The panel can be "flat" or have a hierarchical structure that corresponds to the levels of macroregions, regions, cities and branch groups.

The Argus SSC provides for a mode of operation intended for organizations where there is a ban on IT outsourcing. In this case, the SCMK is installed in the enterprise's IS and only customer employees work with the service.

Use scenarios for Argus SCS

Argus SSC allows you to solve several extremely complex and common IT problems:

• Maintenance of ICs with very high requirements for the pace of elimination of IT problems.
• Continuous audit of IE. This is a type of IT audit that allows you to monitor the operation of systems and services in real time during "peak" loads, as well as when making large-scale changes to IP.
• Increase the efficiency of the IT service without outsourcing IP services.
• Monitor the operation of critical equipment (for example, sales equipment or cash registers at retail enterprises).

Systems and Components

SSC "Argus" uses open source software products, its own developments of the Competence Center for Import Substitution and Open Source ALP Group:

• The Zabbix monitoring system (version 3.0) is the central link of the system for collecting, storing and processing primary information, providing data aggregation, processing threshold values, equipment inventory, forecasting changes by main indicators.
• Free software of middleware class, focused on message transmission, RabbitMQ, serves as a bus for data exchange between SCM components: monitoring agents, services for storing and processing structured and unstructured data, Service Desk system, notification service, etc. Allows you to quickly adapt and develop the SCM platform, adding the necessary components without changing the architecture, and also provides the ability to integrate with almost any existing customer IC.
• Argus Agent and Zabbix Agent are responsible for automatically detecting and configuring monitoring objects, collecting primary data and transmitting them to the monitoring system. Automatically deploy, update, and manage the configuration of monitoring agents.
• Graylog and Elastic Search provide collection, processing and storage of unstructured data and application logs, full-text search, filtering and normalization, and further routing of received messages, extracting additional fields, adding calculated fields, defining context, binding geodata, etc.
• Nginx is an application server that provides load balancing for SCM components.
• OS Alt Server and CentOS are the main operating systems for SCS components.
• ALP Group's own developments:
  • means of visualization of information about IT problems on the interactive map of the Russian Federation;
  • deep monitoring tools HyperV and; MS SQL
  • Services required to control whether the customer's IT service complies with the recommendations of expert groups and best practices in setting up applications tools for unloading engineers in terms of installations and updates of agents;
  • tools for monitoring the efficiency of human resources use;
  • rules, settings, operation algorithms and various checks of SCM, user interfaces for interaction with the service.