Harvest Features

Enterprise Benchmarks

What is your computer utilisation and what are those of your competitors? Is Return on Investment slower than it ought to be? Harvest calculates enterprise utilisation, indicative purchase cost, power consumption, and monthly charge back cost. Compare your organisation with others in a similar sector to justify costs and support models

Management Decision Support

Advises with dashboards, generated assessements and reports available on the harvest web site. Machines are divided between different parts of the organisation to pinpoint issues and allocate to areas of responsibility.

Relief for Data Centres

Curbs demands on space, cooling, power and staff in hard pressed data centres. When new facilities cost a fortune, the ability to find resources that aren't not being used will delay the need spend significant amounts of money.

Locates Underutilised Servers

Performance data is collected to find the machines that are significantly underused and assigns them to business group, location and application. Reduce costs by recycling idle or redundant machines and deliver this information to each controlling group. The groups compare results with each other and their managers to ensure value for money.

Improvement Methodology

Harvest finds candidates algorithmically, then provides tools to help carry out a more strategic evaluation using a continuous methodology of assessment. The records are stored on the web site and assessment decisions are tracked for remediation. Consolidate application loads by virtualisation, time sharing or using shared services.

Increases Teamwork

Each machine has an individual message board that can be posted to and read by every one involved, across multiple teams. This 'blog' on every machine builds up information and tactical detail available to all and enables better decisions to be taken in the assessment methodology.

Portal Reports

Harvest gives strategic information to line managers, senior technical management and planners, enabling them to smoothly run their business. The insight into capacity and trends will enlighten budget discussions and help the correct decisions to be made.
Organisational utilisation A daily calculation is made of aggregated and weighted utilisation accross the enterprise and divided into hierarchical organisational groups. Available as a set of numeric tables and trended on strip charts over various time periods, it enables the efficency of peer groups to be compared.
Application utilisation As with organisational comparisons, utilisation by application is possible at the whole machine level. The information comes from inventory data, which is the only other information needed by harvest other than the performance data itself.
Regional utilisation Regional and office information in the inventory data enables reports to be built that shows geographic utilisation of machines. Each inventory line identies an associated an owning group and region.
Long-Term machine trends Harvest's repository of machine data is an archive of performance that can span many months or years. Trend reports can cover many periods of time and it is normal to batch create several time spans for rapid web response. However, it is also possible to look at custom host groupings or specific time periods using the web browser or the ghabitat fat client.
Under utilisation Textual report of the machines that are considered to be under utilised. Once identified, discussions should be carried out to find exceptions or to plan remediation
Over utilisation Textual report of machines that can be considered to be overused. Once identified, discussions should be carried out to find exceptions or to plan remediation
Host charts Daily strip charts containing low level collected data are built each day and cover various time periods. They are grouped into organisation, application and regional reports.
Customised tiled performance charts The portal offers a watch sheet, which allows users to place data and charts from machines of interest onto a set of dynamic web pages. Harvest will tile any data it has in the repository on the watch sheet, allowing great flexibility for monitoring service levels, application performance and other measures such as disk capacity.
Inventory cost assessment In addition to knowing the performance rates of the major models of machine, harvest has the ability to calculate the capital and mothly running expnses. This can be customised for your organisation to include your discounts, power costs, administration and other overheads. With this information, indicative cost estimates can be made of your whole inventory and the cost of unused capacity.

Other Features

Personalised web portal Every user can adapt their view of the portal to incorporate the information regarding the machines they care most about, whilst still keeping the core information sources and forums.
E-mailed & messaged report notifications Notifications can be set up using harvest's portal, to e-mail mailing lists or send messages when new reports have been generated. Links are embedded in the e-mails sent to go directly to the report pages in question, avoiding unnecessary initial navigation in the portal.
Performance web forums The harvest portal lets all members take part in discussions regarding specific machines, reports or more general topics.
Harvest security Everyone has individual passwords for the portal and all traffic to the website can be encrypted. Data uploads and downloads are similarly governed. Habitat replications and repository downloads can additionally be protected with time-limited certificates.
Fat or thin client In addition to using a web browser to view the repository data, one can also use ghabitat from the habitat suite, which is a traditional desktop tool (or fat client).
Upload and download of data A user may decide to use an alternative tool for analysing data collected in the repository, such as a spreadsheet. Your data is available in FHA (Fat Headed Array), CSV (Comma Separated Values), TSV (Tab Separated Values) or the Harvest/Habitat XML format.
Third party data Habitat is not the only collection system that can be used with harvest. CPU performance information can be provided by several systems that may already be in place in your organisation. Data from other systems can be included in the repository in several ways: file upload, replication and using habitat as a go-between.
Habitat control If habitat is used as a collection agent, then harvest can be used as a single point of control. Each time data is replicated to the repository, a number of control tables can also updated, including the job and pattern matching tables. (Start-up configurations are the other way to centrally control habitat behavior, but it is advised to run these within your organisation.)

The use of central control allows convenient administration and facilitates an amount of user configuration. For example, application administrators do not always look after the running of habitat on machines and may not have the passwords. This is an area that will be expanded in the future.