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Helix Technical Overview

Managing your IT infrastructure is critical to your business. In addition to knowing the real-time status of your servers and your network devices, being able to predict when your disk space or bandwidth are going to run out before it actually happens is vital to avoiding costly downtime.

Fidelia's Helix offers "instant visibility" for your networks, servers and applications. Helix is powered by the same underlying engine as Fidelia's flagship product, NetVigil, widely acclaimed by analysts and used by large enterprise network and datacenters to monitor hundreds of thousands of IT elements. Helix provides the same real-time dynamic processing capabilities.

Other key features:

• Runs on Linux, Windows, Solaris
• Integrated SQL database for storing trend data for several years
• Smart data aggregation for manageable database sizes without compromising accuracy
• Predictive reporting on upcoming problems
• Powerful correlation graphs between servers, networks and applications
• Web interface offers minimal learning, ubiquitous access
• Automatic setup and discovery- operational within minutes
• Instant drill down from real-time status to historical trend and statistics

Helix offers real-time fault and historical performance for bandwidth, server resources, disks and applications by automatically discovering the type of device and applying heuristics to probe available tests on each device. The intelligent processing engine automatically converts raw metrics to meaningful normalized data such as percentage of memory free or percentage of disk space used so that it delivers value directly out of the box. Most of all, Fidelia is the only company that offers a seamless upgrade path that grows with your needs- from small businesses or departments using Helix, to enterprise wide networks spanning multiple continents and tens of thousands of devices using NetVigil.

Integrated Fault and Historical Performance

Helix was designed to provide real-time fault status as well as long term (up to several years) historical trend data. Most products do not have the architecture to deal with the thousands of data samples collected every day from your servers and network devices and report on them in a meaningful manner. Helix not only collects and stores the data for over 2 years, but performs smart aggregation on the fly to control the database size and avoid database maintenance altogether. The multi-threaded polling engine automatically sends multiple queries in the same packet to reduce the network overhead, and can handle a very large number of queries in an efficient manner.

Powerful Reporting

Helix's strength is in its reports and statistical information, ranging from simple top-N tables to complex correlation graphs and trend reports using regression analysis. You can move seamlessly between fault and performance reports, and the real-time reporting engine displays statistics and reports within seconds of your requesting the report. The wealth of information available such as the 95th percentile, the trend analysis (days to threshold), the historical graphs and histograms allow you to make informed decisions about the weaknesses and performance of your IT infrastructure.

Smart Notification and Alerts

Helix's smart notification engine automatically supresses transient flaps, and prevents alarm floods based on topology and service dependencies. The multi-stage alarm engine provides a comprehensive escalation process to send notifications based on how long a device has been in warning or critical condition, and on time of day and status on repeated polling. You can email, page or run a custom script to restart a process based on the length of time that a device has been in that state. The smart suppression engine uses complex heuristics to avoid false suppression of alarms in redundant networks.

Virtual Device Containers

Fidelia's unique object oriented "container" technology allows you to create "virtual devices" which can consist of monitored elements from different physical devices glued together as a single virtual device. You can take a web server, a database and a router and create a virtual container called 'ecommerce' from these elements. If any of these components fails, your virtual container will also indicate this failure in real-time, thus providing instant views into which critical services are being impacted by the failure of a individual element. Not only can you see the real-time status of the virtual devices, but you can also generate correlation reports for them to determine the exact cause of failure of the service.

About Fidelia

Fidelia delivers “Instant Business Visibility” by providing real-time views of a company's IT infrastructure as applied to its business services. Fidelia's flagship product NetVigil, is based on a massively scalable object oriented architecture which empowers enterprises to view the performance of applications, servers and networks across all their departments distributed geographic locations. Used by enterprises such as Sony Online, Spirit Airlines, Yale University, etc., Fidelia provides substantial return on investment by enabling companies to proactively manage service delivery with maximum cost efficiency. For more information, visit
http://www.fidelia.com or call 866-FIDELIA