Regardless of the subject area, monitoring and management should go hand in hand. Having information without being able to act upon it. Or acting in the absence of empirical data is a poor way to run a business, any sort of business. Nimsoft, the monitoring company that was acquired by CA a year ago, realize this and are today releasing a product that sits upon their existing product, Nimsoft Monitor, and combines that with their Nimsoft Service Desk technology. The multi-tenant solution blends ITIL based management capabilities into a monitoring offering. So what does it offer?

  • Monitoring of infrastructure elements—including servers, storage, network devices and security appliances—across public and private cloud environments
  • Response-time monitoring of applications and services
  • Intelligent threshold and policy driven alerting
  • ITIL-based service management workflows
  • Collaboration tools for operations and help-desk staff
  • Shared configuration management database (CMDB)
  • Intuitive dashboards and reporting
  • APIs interface to third-party solutions and technologies
  • Secure, segmented customer views

I spent some time talking with Chris O’Connell, Director of Product Marketing of Nimsoft to get the inside running on why they’ve made this move and what might be coming further down the line. O’Connell told of the pressure that their customer had been exerting on them to develop a product that closed the loop on the monitoring/acting process, and one that did so with a consistent UI and common deployment. Nimsoft Unified Manager answers this call and does so as either an on-premise of a SaaS application.

I couldn’t help but think that, while this development is good, it is very much an interim step. While service desk management is great, I;’d like to have seen a really deep infrastructure management, deployment and provisioning solution available as part of this. Currently Nimsoft is deeply integrated with SoftLayer, and uses SoftLayer for the provisioning aspects of management.I put it to O’Connell that this really is a half step and that Nimsoft should include all the provisioning functionality to really close the plan/do/act loop. He agreed with my general point and told me to “watch this space”. Interesting.

nimsoft

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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