RiverMuse’s breakthrough event-and-fault management architecture is specifically designed from the ground up to address the issues of change, complexity, collaboration, and cost—ensuring that IT can continually maintain the infrastructure visibility necessary to optimize service levels. It includes a number of architectural innovations that distinctly set it apart from legacy event and fault management platforms.

A Two-Tier Data Model

RiverMuse’s architecture preserves content integrity by separating management data into two separate tiers. The Events tier stores all original content received from the network—including SNMP traps, demand poll results, syslogs, Windows Messages, etc.

The Alerts tier stores all modified content (or “states”) that results from the application of business rules or other operational logic to the original Event content.

RiverMuse natively uses a MySQL database, and in the future may be used with other popular database management systems. All replication, federation, and acceleration are performed within the database itself.

In addition to using a two-tier data model, the RiverMuse platform further ensures content integrity by protecting all data in both tiers from subsequent inputs. Alert data created by additive business logic—such as automation and conditioning—is also retained and protected from subsequent changes. This ensures that all existing business logic will continue to work on all existing data, even as multiple successive changes occur in both the enterprise environment and in the management system itself.

Unified Conditioning Service

All automations, transpositions, enrichments, and correlation rules are applied to a common service layer using a single business logic configuration language based on pure ANSI SQL. This radically simplifies customization of the environment and greatly streamlines change management—since it is much easier to document all actions performed on a system when those actions are performed in one place in a common manner.

Use of Dynamic Variables in Business Logic

RiverMuse allows business logic to be written using “dynamic variables” that are linked to external sources such as CMDBs or change management tools. When infrastructure changes occur, they can thus be automatically reflected in the operative logical statement. This adaptable business logic enables IT organizations to reap the benefits of adaptive infrastructure without sacrificing the day-to-day manageability of the enterprise environment.

Automatic Management by Presence

RiverMuse accelerates management of new networked resources by automatically instantiating business logic for those resources as soon as they are identified in any incoming management data. You can activate this logic without any operator intervention or to immediately present it to an operator for approval. Either way, this automatic “management by presence” will enable IT to respond to infrastructure change much more nimbly than legacy fault management architectures.

Reusable and Transportable Business Logic

RiverMuse’s architecture enables business logic to be reused internally throughout the organization—and even transported between organizations if customers choose to do so. A class-based abstraction layer allows business logic to be anonymously uncoupled from any originating instance and shared with any other RiverMuse user or organization—where it can then be plugged into the local management environment and applied to the same class of resource. RiverMuse will maintain all publicly available business logic in a secure, searchable repository that all registered users can access via the web.

Open, Unified Monitoring Layer

RiverMuse provides an open monitoring layer that handles both passive data (SNMP traps, Windows Event Log, WMI, UNIX and Cisco syslog messages, etc.) and data gleaned from the platform’s native active, policy-based polling engine. Passive data can also be imported into the platform via an XML/SOAP API, making it easy to integrate other management data sources. An intelligent data management mechanism mediates all incoming data—handling tasks such as de-duplication, registering all events, and determining whether data should escalate to the alert tier of the database. All imported and native content (both passive and polled) is thus uniformly time-stamped and kept in one place, where its integrity is protected and it always remains available for compliance, analytics, and forensics.

Multi-Tenancy Architecture

RiverMuse has been designed to intrinsically support multi-tenant deployment. Mediation, for example, can be bounded and distributed on a per-tenant basis to provide customer-centric views of alerts and actions. This allows management services to be appropriately tailored to a variety of current and emerging business models.