Lithium for iOS is available on the App Store and is free!

We have also released Lithium 5.0.12 which includes a bunch of bug fixes and is required for the new Lithium iOS. Lithium 5.0.12 can be downloaded here.

Unlike our competitors, we’re not standing still. The way in which you deploy applications and service is changing; the devices and platforms you use to manage your network are transforming and becoming more mobile. Interaction and collaboration are becoming valuable tools for expanding your expertise and solving complex problems quickly. We are continuing to evolve our product and feature set to meet your needs and to align with the direction of network, storage and server technology. Network Monitoring is not boring, nor is its importance dimishing. Much to the contrary, as organization focus more on the reliability, consistency and quality of services being provided to staff and customers alike, monitoring becomes even more important.

Our job is to make the software that makes your job engaging, exciting and allows you to take the service you provide to your users to the next level in terms of reliability, performance and efficiency. We are very excited about what we have for you in 2011.

Download the Lithium 2011 RoadMap Slides.

Lithium 5.0

The new, Lithium iOS app features a completely new UI on the iPad and many performance improvements across both iPhone and iPad. For the first time you can now manage devices and adjust thresholds from your iPad.

With the Xserve discontinued, Lithium 5.0 lost its high performance deployment platform. We are responding to this by making Lithium available as a VMware and Open Virtualization Format appliance. The appliance itself is based on Ubuntu Linux and sees Lithium Core return to Linux for the first time since 4.9. Leveraging the features of VMware Studio and adhering to a single, controlled Linux deployment platform will allow us to simultaneously release Lithium 5.0 updates for both Mac OS X and CoreVM from May 2011. Beta testing of CoreVM will be offered from February 2011.

Though our attention, creativity and innovation will be squarely focussed on building Lithium 6 there will be ongoing improvement in Lithium 5.0 throughout 2011. The recent 5.0.9 an 5.0.10 releases of Lithium brought many performance improvements in Lithium Core, standardized memory monitoring across Linux, windows and Mac and introduced vastly improved fibre channel switch monitoring. This incremental improvement will continue as Lithium 5.0 grows and matures to a solid, established product.

Introducing Lithium 6.0

The existing Lithium Core code base has evolved since 1999 and is written completely in C. Our passion and expertise is writing network, server and storage monitoring software. We are the first to admit that we are not experts at writing ridiculously efficient routines, the ultra-intricacies of SQL or amazingly flexible yet robust frameworks. There are teams of people out there producing incredible application frameworks in both the open source and commercial space that eclipse our built from scratch code. We have many big ideas that we want to implement in Lithium, but having to do everything from scratch in C is tine consuming and diverts our focus away from the idea itself as we get caught up in re-inventing the procedural wheel in C.

Adopting an established, agile and forward thinking framework upon which to build the next version of Lithium gives us a huge head start and means we can focus on building the most incredible monitoring software. This is why we have chosen to shelve the existing Lithium Core code base and start again using a web based application development framework that allows us to work at a higher level where our focus is features and innovation. We are going to start again from scratch, incorporating all that we have learnt over the last decade of Lithium while starting with major innovations and big ideas from the ground up.

Service Oriented Monitoring

Lithium 6 introduces an architectural shift that we term Service Oriented Monitoring. In Lithium 5 the Device was king and all monitoring data and thresholds existed within that Device. With the rise of cloud applications and storage services, virtualization and the modular, shared nature of network infrastructure this Device centric monitoring model was becoming obsolete. For example you likely no longer have a box that’s just your mail server. You may have one or two servers operating as a HA cluster for the mail server that use a SAN for file storage and may in fact be virtual machines inside a virtualization platform.

The delivery of that once monolithic mail service to your users now involves multiple servers, underlying Ethernet and Fibre Channel switches and virtual machine hypervisors. A failure of any one of those components is significant; but the real value a monitoring system can provide is to inform you of the impact to the users. Sure, a disk has failed in a server and need to be replaced, but that server is part of an HA cluster and the disk was in a RAID 5 set. No need to dispatch alerts at 3am; a new Problem in the Hardware Fault problem queue will suffice. But should the load balancer in front of your HA cluster stop responding to Port 25 then you have a major problem and the mail service is no longer available to the users — wake people up.

This is the thinking that has gone into designing to service oriented monitoring architecture of Lithium 6. You will be able to define what services your network, server and storage infrastructure provides and the components used to deliver that service to your users. Web based applications, Xsan or StorNext storage pools, Mail and File services, etc, etc; whatever your network provides, tell Lithium about it and start monitoring around the delivery of that service and the impact to users.

Alerts

Now that Lithium is aware of the services your users need and what goes into keeping them running we can align the Alerts Lithium produces to describe Impact, not just conditions and thresholds. In Lithium 6 you will be able to control your alert preferences across all Lithium Core deployments through one centralized interface. You can select when you’d like to receive email notifications, push notifications and regular alert/problem digest emails. 

Consistent Monitoring

Whilst the breadth of network-connected components used to deliver services has increased, similarities between these many different device types have also emerged. Virtually every device in your network will have some sort of network interface, it’s also very likely to have a CPU with one or more processing cores and almost certainly has some concept of RAM. Likewise, whether you’re monitoring Windows, Linux, Mac OS X servers — virtual or physical — they all have volumes and disks. Those are the same sort of disks found in a disk array and the volumes on the hosts are those very same that are provided by the RAID sets on those disk arrays. This functional similarity is reflected in how data is presented in Lithium 6. We have defined a fundamental set of building blocks for representing monitoring data that is the same across all vendors and all device types. Whether you’re looking at a Linux host that’s a Xen VM box or a Mac OS X Server instance running on an Xserve, or an Active Storage disk array; the CPU, Memory, Disk and Volume metrics and visual representation look the same, feel the same and the metrics have the same name and significance. 

Creating this consistent set of data types and objects to form the basic building blocks of your infrastructure makes it even easier now to create your own custom monitoring modules for whatever hardware and software you have in your network. Lithium 6 provides you with an extensible set of objects and data types such as RAM, CPU, CPU Core, Disk, Volume, Fan, Power Input, etc — you just need to tell Lithium where to get the values from using either a MIB or an SNMP walk. Or, you can create the objects and input the values directly using the API. 

Social Collaboration

Whether you look after a handful of devices using one Lithium Core instance, or thousands of devices across multiple instances of Lithium Core, you will be part of the Lithium 6 Community of like-minded network and system admins. Collaboration and sharing of Device Templates, Service Templates, Modules and other user-created content is built in to Lithium 6 as a founding concept. In fact, all the templates and modules that we build in to Lithium will be built and shared using the same interface that you can use to model your services and devices. You can create your own custom monitoring templates and share them with colleagues, the wider community or keep them for private use only. 

Single Sign-On and Delegation

At the heart of the social collaboration features of Lithium 6 is a single sign-on mechanism. You as an individual will have one single login for every Lithium deployment that you manage or use. As the admin of a Lithium Core, you can invite others to have temporary or permanent access to that Lithium Core or you can delegate administration rights to your colleagues or customers. The notion of single-sign-on for each individual opens up a new world of collaboration possibilities. Got a problem with a device? Sing out on Twitter, see if anyone can help. Invite an associate to log in and take a look for you. Imagine being able to open a support case with a vendor and having them be able to log in and view the monitoring data directly but only for that device and only for as long as you want. 

Problem Queues

With Alerts now focussed on Impact as opposed to conditions and thresholds, we’ve created Problem Queues for dealing with the day to day operational happenings in your network. When a drive fails, memory resources are running low or CPU usage is unusually high there may not be an immediate impact on your users but these items still need attention. In Lithium 6 these Problems are queued into Problem Queues for Hardware Faults, Application, Operational and Environmental Issues. The separation of these queues by function allows for better triage of the faults especially when working with a team of NOC engineers and facilities staff. 

Built on HTML5 with a Supported API for Native Apps

Lithium 6 will be built on a web based application framework. Where as Lithium 5 is a non-web-based application that exposes a web-based interface and API, Lithium 6 will be a web-based application from the ground up. There will be a documented and supported RESTful API for Native Applications and we intend to keep our Mac OS X and iOS native applications as well as opening the door for Windows, Linux and Android native applications. 

The 5.0.10 release also introduces a vastly improved Qlogic switch module and a brand new module for monitoring Brocade Fibre Channel switches as well as new Generic Fibre Channel Switch support. Again, due to changes in the data structure for the Qlogic module you may need to update triggers and thresholds after the upgrade to 5.0.10.

After upgrading to 5.0.10 you may see new Incidents being raised due to the changes in both Memory monitoring and Qlogic fibre channel switch monitoring. Follow the normal Trigger Tuning process to adjust these to your liking.

Customers can update through the auto-update features in Lithium Core Admin.app or Lithium Console, or the latest version can be downloaded here. Make sure you upgrade both Lithium Core and Console to 5.0.10.

This update has many, many improvements in the performance and stability of Lithium Core and includes a large number of bug fixes and minor features in Lithium Console and Module Builder. Some highlights of this update include:

- Major improvement in Lithium Core’s Disk I/O utilization thanks to optimization of SQL queries and the introduction of rrdcached and RRDtool 1.4.

- Support for Xsnmp.

- Improvements in the accuracy of RAM/Memory reporting.

- Action Filter feature allow Actions to be suppressed per-device by severity.

- Email and Push alert bug fixes and reliability improvements.

The list of development tickets closed in Lithium 5.0.9 is extensive and can be viewed through our LightHouse.

Lithium 5.0.9 is recommended for all users of Lithium 5.0 on both PPC and Intel. We do strongly advise you to backup your Lithium installation prior to performing the upgrade and always have the previous version installer available to roll back to if you experience any problems.

All support queries should be directed to support.lithium5.com

Thank you very much for your patience, and a special thanks to everyone who participated in the pre-release build testing throughout the development of Lithium 5.0.9.