Versiera Blog

Conceptually Versiera agents act as a mechanism for the collection of information for a given system or environment. The central Versiera system, apart from storing the collected information, includes monitoring and compliance features that allow for review of the collected data against a set of rules or policies that are intended to assert operational status or adherence to policy. To communicate important information Versiera may use email, SMS and pager notifications. From a high-level perspective using Versiera allows you to see what is there, how it may be changing, and whether you should be attending to anything. An important component in any successful systems management practice is documentation. The documentation should not only be restricted to system elements, but should include a documentation work-flow and collaborative features. Work is in progress to integrate the Rees Ticketing System with Versiera. The integration process will permit Versiera monitoring or compliance events to automatically generate tickets in Rees for assignment to operators. System operators in the same, or remote sites can individually or cooperatively create and work on Rees tickets. The addition of Rees to Versiera will broaden the information work flow from identifying problems, to their documentation, resolution and historical record keeping.

Computers on the Internet communicate with one another based on each other’s IP addresses. Since it is easier for humans to remember computer names rather than IP addresses, Domain Name System (DNS) came about to facilitate the translation or mapping of fully qualified domain names (FQDN) such as www.versiera.com into their Internet IP address (216.176.62.87). DNS must be manually administered to manage the translation mappings for computer names and their respective IP addresses. Dynamic DNS enables automatic updates of DNS records by remote computers whenever their IP address changes and to populate or update the changes in DNS. The frequent updates of computer IP addresses are usually the result of Internet facing computers configured to receive their IP address from Cable/DSL Internet Service Providers (ISPs) using Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). Versiera will shortly be adding to its list of features Dynamic DNS (DDNS). Users of Versiera will have the ability to assign alias names (i.e. mycomputer.locate-ip.com) to Versiera registered hosts and place them into one of several available domain zone files. Versiera agents residing on remote computers will be responsible for maintaining updated DDNS records whenever the computer’s IP address changes (more precisely the source Internet IP address seen by Versiera). Computers with a static Internet IP address that are not already referenced in any Internet DNS zone file can also benefit by using Versiera DDNS to allow for their referencing by an assigned alias name in Versiera. To locate or connect to your computer from another location on the Internet, Versiera users will only have to remember the name they have assigned their particular computer i.e. PING mycomputer.locate-ip.com.

To now, Versiera has provided passive monitoring services for tracking the operation and health of host devices on the hosted Versiera Internet service. Active monitoring using SNMP has been reserved for corporate environments that acquire the Versiera Enterprise appliance. Passive monitoring does have limitations and there are situations where active monitoring is necessary to ascertain whether Internet facing services are functioning correctly. Internet services such as Domain Name Service (DNS), Simple Mail Transfer Protocol Mail Service (SMTP), and Website Uniform Resource Locator (URL) need an active monitoring component to test the operation of their Internet service functionality. The testing of Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDN), Website URLs and Mail Delivery will comprise the initial set of active monitoring functionality and will be added to the Versiera Professional hosting service. The active monitoring of these services will be restricted to registered hosts running Versiera agents.