The flagship offering from FiveRuns Corporation, FiveRuns Systems Management is a platform based on Ruby on Rails and AJAX technology that is targeted primarily to SMB admins. The platform provides a browser-based (vendor hosted) interface that allows the admin to monitor their key servers and applications, including event reporting, current status, and troubleshooting capabilities.

To deploy the platform, the user signs up to access their own area of the FiveRuns Web site, such as yourcompany.fiveruns.com. They then download and install a "Smart Client" component on each of their own servers they wish to monitor. These clients perform the actual monitoring of the server and its subsystems, sending the resulting information in an encrypted format back to the FiveRuns site, where it is stored in an area separate from other FiveRuns customers. According to the vendor, no firewall changes are likely to be necessary to support these communications; though the messages are encrypted, they are transmitted over standard HTTP connections. Further, all communications are initiated from the customer's servers (i.e., from the Smart Clients themselves), and not from the vendor's host servers. Only one Smart Client needs to actually contact the vendor's host servers; it can then effectively act as a proxy for all other Smart Clients on the customer's network. Any of the Smart Clients can serve as a proxy for the network, thus the Smart Clients can provide failover and high availability capabilities to one another. The actual communications to the host servers can occur as often as once every 5 minutes, or as seldom as once each time the monitored server is rebooted.

The vendor states that both open source and proprietary systems are supported for monitoring, they include Linux, Windows (2000/XP/2003), Solaris, Mac OS X, JBoss, Apache, Tomcat, and MySQL. Additionally, the vendor states that the Smart Clients are auto-updating and self-configuring.

Once the smart clients are in operation, the admin can examine and analyze the information they provide by connecting (IE 6, Firefox, Safari) to the unique site name they created when they initially signing up for the service. Available tools in the AJAX-based interface include:

- A Global View screen, which provides access to current system status for each monitored component, a listing of recent events, and a link to the troubleshooting area

- A System Browser, with the ability to drill down into monitored systems and subsystems to examine performance metrics (graphs and performance info based on preset threshold values or admin overrides are also available). The system stores up to 35 days of detail data for each system, at which time the information is rolled up; and a zoom capability allows for a close-up look of performance metrics over the previous 24 hours

- Event Details, which provides the ability to examine the details of metrics that triggered a particular event

- Troubleshooting Suggestions, plain-text potential remediation information pertaining to an event, collected from integrated internal and external sources

- Reporting, with options including detail zooming and scheduled creation with E-mail delivery (PDF).

FiveRuns Systems Management is available now; pricing starts at $60 per server/per month, regardless of the number of applications running on the servers. A free trial is also available.

Contact FiveRuns for further information.