Nastel and Complex Event Processing

Any of these issues sound familiar?

• Can you tell the difference between "business normal" and "business abnormal"?
• Do you need to know if production is veering towards disaster long before a customer is impacted
• Would you like real-time 360° situational awareness?

Nastel AutoPilot with its CEP engine and its unique policies for defining "business normal" and "business abnormal" can help you.

Complex Event Processing (CEP) is a technology for building and managing event-driven information systems. CEP is primarily an event processing concept that deals with the task of processing multiple events from an event cloud with the goal of identifying the meaningful events within the event cloud. CEP employs techniques such as detection of complex patterns of many events, event correlation and abstraction, event hierarchies, and relationships between events such as causality, membership, and timing, and event-driven processes.

The Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine that forms the core of AutoPilot M6 combines real-time rules engine processing with unique time-based trend recognition, pattern matching and predictive problem prevention capabilities to ensure high availability and peak performance for complex business critical transactions and applications. With AutoPilot M6 you can be confident of consistently meeting your critical SLAs and regulatory compliance requirements.

The AutoPilot Virtual CEP Engine is the event stream processing and correlation foundation of the AutoPilot M6 technology. This engine allows aggregation, sorting, filtering, merging and joining of various events and metric streams in real-time using a wizard driven GUI interface. 

The sophisticated AutoPilot M6 CEP engine enables high speed, high volume, time-based rules processing to ensure high availability and peak performance for complex business critical applications. Through its CEP engine, AutoPilot M6 can collect, aggregate, filter and correlate metrics and events from infrastructure systems with data from external sources such as RSS and news feeds and even email messages for complete situational awareness.

In AutoPilot M6, CEP instances can be replicated or auto-failed over with M6-GRID within minutes or even seconds. They can be consolidated or distributed on one or more hardware or Virtual Machines -- such as VMWare or XEN. The replacement hardware/operating system does not have to be identical. The AutoPilot M6 CEP engine has fault, performance and security isolation, treating each CEP instance independent of one another. As a result of this innovative isolation, a crash or malfunction in one instance does not affect another instance.

With its innovative, powerful CEP engine, AutoPilot M6 combines high level application transaction monitoring with deeply granular sub-system and infrastructure management capabilities.

Complex Event Processing (CEP) is an important enabling technology for Nastel’s Business Transaction Performance™ capabilities.  Our implementation of CEP, together with our statistical baselining, policy engine and wizard interface enables customers to easily define "business normal" and "business abnormal conditions".   Using both Nastel and 3^rd party harvested events; the CEP is able to determine if production is veering toward disaster long before a customer is impacted.  The power of Nastel’s implementation of CEP to process millions of metrics, rules and messages per second and correlate operational and transactional data in a business context deliver what Nastel refers to as real-time 360° situational awareness™. 

• Out-of-the-box tools for APM (Application Performance Monitoring) – no need to spend on integration – enabling rapid deployment and short time to value.
• Real-time rules engine processing
• Unique time-based trend recognition
• Pattern matching
• Predictive problem prevention capabilities
• A collection of distributed CEP engines that can collaborate, linked using high speed pub/sub – enabling almost linear scalability in accordance with load
• Out of the box grid-failover capabilities for enterprise deployments
• State replication across multiple CEP servers, warm-failover
• Out-of-the-box analytics (mathematical computations such as Standard dev, EMA (Exponentially moving avg.), MA (moving avg.), momentum indicators and many more) to determine business normal vs. abnormal states
• Visualization provided via a dashboard specifically designed for personnel monitoring complex environments
• Comprehensive security, permission control (integration with Windows AD, Kerberos)

• High speed, millions of executions per second

• Hot deploy capabilities

The AutoPilot Virtual CEP Engine Delivers Tangible Benefits:

• Reduces time to install and configure a new monitoring domain from days/weeks to minutes.
• Lets you move a CEP instance to a new server or Virtual Machine in just minutes with uninterrupted operation.
• The AutoPilot M6-GRID provides automatic CEP instances provisioning in case one or more are offline for maintenance or any other reason.
• Allows you to easily and quickly allocate CEP instances on the fly without service interruptions.
• Enables dynamic resource allocations.
• Policies can be reassigned and redeployed within seconds to any CEP instance.

Complex Event and Metric Processing

Virtual Complex Event & Metric Processor

As defined by Wikipedia:" Complex Event Processing is primarily an event processing concept that deals with the task of processing multiple events with the goal of identifying the meaningful events within the event cloud. CEP employs techniques such as detection of complex patterns of many events, event correlation and abstraction, event hierarchies, and relationships between events such as causality, membership, and timing, and event-driven processes. CEP is to discover information contained in the events happening across all the layers in an organization and then analyze its impact from the macro level as "complex event" and then take subsequent action plan in real time”.

• “Am I compliant with regulations?”
• “Are my transactions behaving as expected?”
• “Am I incurring latency?”
• “Are there operational issues causing my latency”?
• “Am I compliant with my SLAs?”
• "What combination of events is note-worthy?"
• “How would you filter extraneous events?"
• “What is my current situation?”
• “What is the pattern of events that may cause degradation of performance?”
• And many others, including user defined conditions…

Nastel’s CEP Implementation has the following characteristics:

• Built using Service Oriented Architecture
• Layered architecture, abstracted from AutoPilot
  • It can consume events from other systems that collect events
  • It can write its analysis output to the Nastel UI or dashboard, or export events to a 3^rd party event management console