The purpose of the FGSMS is to provide an open source enterprise service and resource management (ESM) capability that is secure, scalable and flexible. In general, ESM products provide performance monitoring of web resources such as XML web services or messaging brokers, auditing and usage tracking, service level agreements, email alerts, report generation, include a user interface that makes sense of this data and lastly, some kind of federation mechanism to expose collected data to others. FGSMS currently provides these capabilities by installing and integrating agents into products and/or servers that are to be monitored with minimal effort and performance impact while providing a high level of robustness. These agents are easily extendable to monitor new capabilities and technologies as they become available. Because of the scale and function of FGSMS, it is targeted for brigade level and higher echelons, network operating centers, cloud hosting facilities or other operation centers.
Aside from production level monitoring of software, FGSMS can also be used for other purposes, such as developer and compliance testing, scenarios by using the message logging features. FGSMS is Open Source Software (OSS) and is currently available on github.com.
Centrally monitoring and managing web service and resources is a critical service oriented architecture (SOA) capability. The idea behind SOA, and now the micro-service trend, is to break monolithic components down into smaller, reusable pieces and exposing them as distributed XML services or resources. Distributing components introduces a number of unique challenges such as centralized access control, auditing, performance monitoring and management. These problems become further compounded when introducing cloud environments and virtualization. For example, for even the best of system administrators, it can be difficult to detect that particular web service has faulted and thus a critical component is no longer available.
When distributing components, knowing the true dependencies for a specific component can be difficult, despite having detailed documentation. FGSMS’s agents can at least help solve this problem through dependency injection which allows the tracking of a service invocation from end to end. This also helps to enable root cause analysis.
One of the problems common to existing ESM capabilities is the lack of extensibility. FGSMS was designed from the ground up to make it easy for developers to add new capabilities, components or data collection agents to their instance. The database and services are well documented and were designed with an easy to understand schema to make exporting data for specialized purposes simple. Some of the capability gaps that were identified include the lack of sufficient data access control measures, limited reporting capabilities, lack of easy data extraction or federation. All of these deficiencies are directly addressed by FGSMS.