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So your organization has made the decision to start using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Your company is embracing the cloud and is going to save time, resources, and money by using EC2. Now, as an IT manager, you are wondering...how will I incorporate and manage this, along with all of the other technology in our data center?

Novell Operations Center has an integration to Amazon EC2 that allows you to monitor and manage Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), instances, and elastic block volumes. You can also view the relationships between Amazon EC2 objects. For example, you have an instance that is running, but it was not set up by you, so you want to see from which AMI it was launched. You can view this relationship in Operations Center. What if an engineer just opened a help desk ticket complaining of slow performance on his EC2 instance? You can locate that instance in the integration and view performance data from EC2 within the Operations Center client.

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Figure 1 - Operations Center Client showing an EC2 Instance

Let's take it one step further. Say the Director of Engineering has come to you asking for help in determining what resources are being used by the Engineering staff. With Operations Center, you can set up service models to monitor EC2 resources by team or projects. So you can deliver a dashboard to the Director of Engineering to see a high level view of the organization.

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Figure 2 - Operations Center Dashboard showing service models and linked EC2 instances

Operations Center will allow you to view your EC2 data in the same manner you would view any other underlying IT data (Network Monitoring, Performance Management, etc.). So you need not fear the cloud.

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.