What is Zenprise?

BlackBerry Monitoring

Zenprise looks at the overall health of your entire BlackBerry infrastructure.

Monitor RIM SRP: Proactively detects availability of the RIM network. Can correlate pending messages, mail delivery delays, synchronization problems to overall SRP availability issues.

Monitor Carrier Network: Identifies outages across carrier network that impact BlackBerry users.

Monitor BlackBerry Device: Determines overall availability of BlackBerry device. Introspects device for OS, PIN, IMEI, policies, flash size, and password enablement.

Monitor BlackBerry Enterprise Server: Identifies availability of critical services, including: BlackBerry Controller, and BlackBerry Dispatcher. Proactively detects hung MAPI threads plus critical errors in BES application log files. Measures pending messages, messages sent, messages received, filtered messages, expired messages, message latency, sync times, bytes sent to device, bytes received from device, failed MDS connections, disk queue length, available memory, TCP connection failures, TCP connection resets, and countless other performance metrics.

Monitor Exchange: Determines overall health of Exchange mail store as well as availability of critical services including: Information Store Service, and System Attendant. Automatically runs mailflow tests to determine availability and performance of mail within a routing group, across a routing group, and out to the Internet.

Monitor Active Directory: Monitors availability and performance of Global Catalogue servers and Domain Controllers. Identifies any configuration problems with service accounts, permissions, etc.

Monitor DNS: Ensures that name resolution is working correctly. Will validate resolution to SRP network and ensure overall DNS integrity (i.e. all MX records exists, proper use of CNAMES, A records, zones, etc.).

Monitor LAN/WAN Network: Runs real time tests like traceroutes, pings, telnets to ensure network availability.

User Dashboard

VIP Dashboard: Creates dashboard view of the most critical users within the organization. Proactively monitors and resolves issues before executives notice availability or performance problems. Identifies pending messages, last sync times, carrier issues, SRP issues, mail latency, and hung MAPI threads.

User Infrastructure View: Details all infrastructure components user relies on. For example, Zenprise understands that User A is serviced by BES server BES01, the mailbox resides on Exchange server EXCH01, which is dependent on an Active Directory Global Catalog GC03, and DNS server DNS04. Further, Zenprise also understands that the server BES01 is serviced by RIM’s SRP network srp.us.blackberry.net, and User A’s BlackBerry device is connected to Sprint PCS’ carrier network.

Real Time User Diagnostics: Pings device, sends test messages to handhelds, sends and measures delivery of test messages over 10 minute interval.

Device Configurations: Details OS, model type, carrier, network type, pin, IMEI, password settings, and policies applied.

Service availability: Pinpoints any user performance or availability issues. Provides red/green health status for each BlackBerry user in the organization.

Real-Time Performance: Provides visibility around total messages forwarded to handheld, sent from handheld, pending messages, expired messages, filtered messages, and failed messages. Additionally measures overall latency between user’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server and user’s Exchange server.

User Search: Quickly identifies all users on a particular carrier or particular device. Additional searches around user name, LDAP identifier, phone number, or email address.

What makes us different

Zenprise’s approach to managing BlackBerry as a service centers around a holistic end-to-end view of the BlackBerry messaging environment. Unlike traditional BlackBerry monitoring tools, Zenprise can:

1. Go beyond BES log files:

Zenprise is the only BlackBerry monitoring solution that collects and analyzes data from the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) and the Exchange, Active Directory, and DNS servers. A large number of BlackBerry user-facing issues are caused by problems occurring outside the BES server. Such issues are either never logged in the verbose logs maintained by the BES server, or find representation as ambiguous references across several log entries. Zenprise’s unique end-to-end approach ensures that BlackBerry users’ availability or performance problems are proactively detected and correlated to BlackBerry, Exchange, AD or DNS infrastructure issues. The collection and analysis of data outside the BES server allows Zenprise to accurately detect the true root cause of an issue. Consider the following examples:

a. Issue: Hung MAPI threads

Traditional monitoring system: Will report that hung MAPI threads found in log files.

The Zenprise Approach: Will report that RPC latency issues on Exchange Server are causing hung MAPI threads.

b. Issue: High number of messages delivered by rescans

Traditional monitoring system: Will report that log files indicate messages to users are being delivered by rescans

The Zenprise Approach: Will report that abnormal Exchange Server disk I/O performance is causing high number of rescans.

2. Go beyond the What

Identifying the Why and the How: Whereas most monitoring solutions provide only event information – the What, Zenprise provides important answers to IT operations – what we call the Why and How. Consider the following examples:

a. Issue: BES cannot connect to Exchange server

Traditional monitoring system: Will report that BES cannot connect to the Exchange server (the what).

The Zenprise Approach: Will report that BES cannot connect to the Exchange server (the what) because the MAPI port is not registered on the Exchange server (the why). Restart the Information Store service on the Exchange server (the how).

b. Issue: Enterprise Activation failure

Traditional monitoring system: Will report that Enterprise Activation failed for user Jane Doe (the what).

The Zenprise Approach: Will report that Enterprise Activation failed (the what) because the Activation message was moved to the Deleted Items folder (the why). Investigate mailbox rules that are moving messages to Deleted Items folder (the how).

c. Issue: Mailbox access errors

Traditional monitoring system: Will report that a mailbox cannot be started by BES agents (the what).

The Zenprise Approach: Will report that a mailbox cannot be started by BES agents (the what) because the BES service account does not have Full Mailbox Access permissions (the why). Assign the BES service account Full Mailbox Access permissions(the how).

3. 57 Alerts by 9:00 a.m.

Any plans for rest of the day? Traditional monitoring systems generate alerts for every instance of every symptom seen on a managed server. Many organizations often receive too many alerts, obfuscating the real problems amonst the noise of notifications. Such monitoring systems force IT operations to spend time managing alerts in order to find and troubleshoot real problems.

Rather than sending alerts for hundreds of symptoms seen across the environment, Zenprise will troubleshoot these symptoms by running diagnostic tests no different from the ones run by expert administrators. These tests allow Zenprise to rule out false positives, as well as automatically correlate several alerts into a single root cause. For example:

a. Issue: SRP Disconnects

Traditional monitoring systems: Will generate 30 SRP disconnect alerts.

The Zenprise Approach: Will generate a single Root Cause stating that SRP disconnects are caused by an invalid SRP authentication key. To get to this root cause, Zenprise automatically runs multiple diagnostics tests to ensure that the SRP address is valid, the SRP hostname can be resolved, the SRP key is valid, the BES Router configuration is correct, the necessary ports are not being used by another process, the RIM network is accessible via telnet tests or via BBSRPTest tests (utility from the BES Resource Kit). Based on the results from these multiple diagnostics tests, Zenprise is able to provide specific details on the root cause of the SRP disconnects, along with step-by-step resolution instructions on how to fix the issue. This saves IT operations from manually running these tests on their own to get to the root cause of SRP disconnect issues.

b. The Issue: BES server cannot access an Exchange mailbox

Traditional monitoring systems: Will generate 15 user not started alerts and 10 mailbox access alerts.

The Zenprise Approach: Will report single root cause – User mailbox moved to an Exchange mailbox Store where BES does not have adequate permissions. To get to this root cause, Zenprise identifies the new mailbox Store for the user, automatically checks Active Directory to see whether the BES service account has send as and receive as permissions for this individual user. If these permissions are not available at the user object, Zenprise then analyzes whether the service account has permissions at either the store or storage group level, and if so, whether inheritance is enabled. These automated tests ensure that IT receives a single, actionable alert.

4. Easy to use:

One of the significant benefits of Zenprise is its remarkable ease of use. The end-to-end picture of the BlackBerry infrastructure – from the Exchange server to the BlackBerry handheld, allows administrators and IT helpdesk personnel to instantly pinpoint exactly where in the infrastructure the problem lies. A help desk operator unfamiliar with BES can use the product within minutes to identify and solve complex problems.

5. Built for the largest organizations:

Zenprise is built to scale to the largest BlackBerry deployments. A single Zenprise server can support in excess of 150 BES servers. View sample list of Zenprise customers.

Zenprise Key Features:

Automated Troubleshooting

Zenprise automatically troubleshoots across multiple sources including event logs, configuration errors, and performance data to immediately pinpoint underlying causes.

Customized Resolution Plans

Zenprise automatically generates step-by-step action plans to fix the problems in your environment.

Task instructions customized to local infrastructure including hostnames, IPs, users, etc. Resolution instructions displayed as simple, easy-to-read flowcharts

Visual Performance Maps

Zenprise creates performance profiles unique to the behavior of the environment to help predict impending problems and to assist with capacity planning.

Automatic performance benchmarking, dynamically updated Easy to use charts; adjustable time horizons by host

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