Are you a data custodian or IT professional for an enterprise doing business in Europe? Do you struggle with obtaining detailed metrics about a condition or event when issues arise with IT resources like servers and storage devices?
If so, then you’ll be glad to know that Cobalt Iron has just been granted another European patent, this time on dynamic data collection fidelity.
What does that mean, you ask? Fidelity refers to the level of detail collected. European patent no. 3684027 describes new capabilities in Compass that, when fully implemented, will automatically and dynamically adjust data collection granularity and frequency in response to a detected event or condition. As a result, Compass will be better able to detect, debug, and remediate transient failures, inefficiencies, and security exposures in complex, distributed IT environments.
In other words, the European Patent Office recognizes Cobalt Iron’s unique approach to collecting and monitoring data depending on the situation.
Why You Need It
Comprehensive data collection and effective monitoring are woefully lacking in the enterprise IT world. For example, enterprise backup has many moving parts, including backup servers, backup server operating systems, a backup catalog or database, backup software, backup agents, storage devices, networking, and maybe cloud resources. Each of these components should be monitored continuously for health, capacity, performance, and ransomware issues, but that monitoring rarely happens.
Furthermore, for certain conditions or events, it’s a good idea to perform higher-fidelity (i.e., more detailed) and more frequent data collection and monitoring to help identify, analyze, remediate, and track any issues. Yet it’s rare for enterprises to collect data adequately on these various metrics and conditions. Even when some data collection occurs, it is almost always static in nature, meaning that systems do the same level of data collection at the same frequency no matter the situation or operational status.
Enterprises need more dynamic means of collecting data about IT infrastructure and operations. In particular, when certain conditions or events occur, IT administrators and other IT professionals must be able to collect more information from certain components or operations in order to properly analyze, prepare for, and respond to those conditions or events.
In just one of many examples, failing hardware devices might issue warnings, I/O errors, or transient errors, or they could demonstrate other symptoms. In these scenarios, it is often valuable to have more detailed and more frequent metrics for specific hardware devices or specific components of hardware devices in order to determine the nature and extent of the failures, particularly when it comes to transient errors.
What It Will Do
This technology qualified for a patent because, unlike various other IT data collection, monitoring, and reporting tools that are almost all static, Cobalt Iron’s technology introduces novel and automated approaches to adjusting the fidelity (detail) and frequency of data collection on IT resources. In essence, this patent discloses techniques to automatically turn the detail level and frequency of data collection up or down.
Specifically, the newly patented techniques mean Compass will be able to:
- Identify hardware components and operations that might be associated with a certain condition or event, such as failing disk drives, transient hardware problems, network utilization issues, ransomware attacks, or particular security conditions.
- Continually monitor for and analyze metrics, events, and conditions associated with hardware resources.
- Dynamically adjust data collection fidelity (i.e., adjust detail levels of its metrics, data, and operational data collection) and frequency for those components and operations based on conditions or events in the environment.
- Dynamically resume normal data collection when the condition or event has ceased.
What It Means for You
These patented techniques will automatically initiate deeper and more frequent levels of data collection for all infrastructure components and operations that might be associated with a particular condition or event. You’ll be able to quickly gain deeper insights into issues in response to device warnings, failures, or other conditions. As a result, Compass will give more precise analysis of the environment and events, minimize risks to IT infrastructure and operations, make it easier to resolve problems, and might even capture critical information about an event that would otherwise likely be lost.
If you want to know more, then get in touch. And we’ll be back soon with more patent goodness!
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