Solving Server Tool Management Challenges with JetPatch Agent Manager

THE CHALLENGE

Server tool management is an ongoing struggle for enterprises big and small. From experiencing a lack of visibility and control, to severe cloud complexities, IT teams across the spend countless hours in decoding these problems.

We took a deep-drive into the challenges that companies face with server tool management in our previous article, which you can read here.

Our conclusion was that to manage server solutions in a well-organized manner, IT organizations must be given complete control and visibility of their server stacks.

Allowing you to manage solutions across multiple infrastructures, JetPatch’s Agent Manager uses a single integrated console for complete server stack viewership. This aids in carefully monitoring the health and status of each management solution, making them work seamlessly with each other. Additionally, Agent Manager further assists in viewing all the solutions that have been deployed across multiple servers. Identifying coverage gaps and providing necessary support carries key importance, and new solutions therefore need to be examined before implementation.

CENTRAL LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT OF TOOLS

Properly deploying solutions is the primary step, but only constitutes stage one of the process. Throughout the lifecycle of these solutions, IT organizations must also ensure the following:

1. Configuring solutions to meet changing application needs
2. Rewiring to report to new backend consoles
3. Monitoring for stability and health

To minimize repercussions on systems and users, IT executives must identify and remediate failed solutions earnestly. Server tools require periodical updates with changing computing landscapes, thereby increasing the workload on IT admins. In such complex situations, JetPatch’s Agent Manager serves as the perfect tool for ideal results. Providing a centralized and automated way to handle initial agent provisioning, it empowers teams to get resources faster, and carry out tasks efficiently.

ENTERPRISE GRADE ACCESS CONTROL

JetPatch Agent Manager provides role-based access controls. But how does this benefit IT organizations? Well, by providing multiple teams with the same centralized console. This does come with a caveat: These access controls are provided only to authorized users, and for server management solutions that are within the team’s responsibility.

POLICY-DRIVEN AUTOMATION

Ensuring that management tools remain in the correct configuration and good health is of paramount importance to IT organizations. To ensure this, JetPatch employs policy-based controls that automatically map the right tools to each server; according to its location and use. For example, servers in North America and EU, or hosting databases or web apps, can each be managed with appropriate and different policies.

CLOUD READY

In today’s complex environments, scaling processes whilst maintaining centralized visibility is key to success. However, for JetPatch, the cloud is just another environment to take on massive workloads. Managed with a common set of policies that are set to a single console, the cloud can be used to:

• Handle on-premise virtual & physical servers
• Hosted & hybrid servers
• Public & private cloud environments

This in turn enables organizations to really take advantage of the cloud’s speed and flexibility.

ABOUT JETPATCH AGENT MANAGER

Agent deployment proves to be a herculean task for most IT organizations. Assigning the right tools to appropriate servers is a time-consuming process and often delays other business processes. This is frustrating to business owners as time is lost, leaving deliverables stagnated, and sometimes brought to a standstill. However, JetPatch’s Agent Manager acts as the perfect solution for server tool agents and businesses as a whole.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the Agent Manager’s features:

1. Discovery of agent and server inventory
   JetPatch effectively communicates with various entities such as cloud, virtualization and tool servers to build a complete, centralized view of agent deployment. It also discovers where these servers are running, and subsequently, what configuration they are operating on.
2. User-defined central agent management policies
   New servers are assigned the right agents automatically through centralized management policies. However, they can be adjusted for specific situations such as:
   • Migrating between data centers
   • Going through a dev-stage-run sequence
3. Library of pre-integrated tool agents
   JetPatch includes a large set of pre-packaged, popular tool agents, plus a self-service packaging wizard for adding new agents.
4. Agent auto-fix and reconfigure
   Broken and unhealthy agents need to be instantly identified to minimize the risk on servers. JetPatch Agent Manager helps automatically recognizing, restarting, reconfiguring, and reinstalling these agents when deemed necessary.
5. In the cloud and on-premise
   Shifting workloads from one environment to another is no easy task. Therefore, to ensure a seamless transition, JetPatch operates in all environments including AWS, Azure, and OpenStack clouds to help accelerate this process.
6. Deep visibility and diagnostics
   Ensuring maximum visibility of server agents helps owners gain easy access to their own tools. These granular access controls ensure users can explore the status of any agent, and read its log files whenever required.
7. Orchestrate agents and their servers
   Managing server agents and keeping a keen eye on them can be the difference between success or failure. Hence, JetPatch automatically registers new agents with management servers, removes agents that are no longer in use, and assigns configuration to each agent. This inturn simplifies, accelerates, and modernizes management of enterprise IT tools and services.

TO SUM UP

Quickly deploying server resources to the right server management solutions has been a primary challenge for organizations worldwide. With the increasing number of both physical and virtual servers, there has also been a rise in overall complexities. Current manual processes, templates, and generic configurations may succeed, but do so at a much slower rate.

JetPatch on the other hand, gives organizations complete visibility and control over the entire lifecycle of management solutions. This helps in elevating speed and agility as these solutions are unified and automated, leading to perfectly met business requirements.

Would you like to explore JetPatch Agent Manager for your business? You can learn more about the platform, or schedule a demo, here.