Hyperic calls itself an Open Source Web Infrastructure Monitoring and Management Software, it aims at automating your operations. Hyperic HQ is GPL, but they also offer a Silver Support package that includes low cost support.

Hyperic has Auto-Discovery, it understands a lot of technologies over 9 different operating systems and it's within their goals to manage everything centrally and fast allowing their customers to focus on serious issues. HQ collects both real-time and historical metrics from production environments including hardware, network and application layers of your infrastructure with what they claim no need for invasive instrumentation. Hyperic does performance tracking , alerting upon performance problems or inventory changes and even diagnoses errors to issue corrective actions remotely. They claim to be able to correlate events, config changes or even security events in your environment

The list of tools and platforms that Hyperic HQ knows about is growing everyday Not only does Hyperic manage these products it does so by talking to the native API's that these products provide. Unlike different other tools we've ran into , Hyperic goes IN the application you are monitoring.

Looking at Hyperic HQ from an architectural point of view they isolate different layers. They start out with a platform which is a machine / operating system combination or a network or storage devices. Hyperic HQ likes to look at components such as the CPU, the Network interfaces or the Filesystems. One step further is the server , the server is the actual piece of software installed on the machine, it could be a web server , a database or a messaging server. Next up is the service , an example might be the vhost that is configured within a web server. The bigger picture for HypericHQ is the Application, which is usually a combination of different components that need to be working, the combination of an Apache virtual host, filesystem and a MySQL database.

Hyperic HQ has an active community and even it's own HyperForge where people can find all kind of different plugins

 

Most other Monitoring systems just realize about your MySQL being up or down, Hyperic tells you how fast your indexes, and tables are growing and how many QPS you have on a specific table. The information is in there however we have to admit that sometimes it takes a while to find it back :)

Apart from looking at your database Hyperic also gives you a GUI to optimize and check your tables. So Hyperic goes beyond monitoring , alerting and trending into fully managing your infrastructure.

Also when working with different Jboss versions Hyperic knows about JMX, giving you more finegrained information.