Nimsoft (more on them here) is today announcing its monitoring toolset, Nimsoft Monitor, covers the performance monitoring of vCloud environments. I’ve long said that dynamic monitoring and control will become increasingly important in the future as organizations look to really leverage the elasticity that cloud brings – one can only drive elasticity if one has an insight into how different workloads and resources are performing. The key will be to bring this level insight to heterogeneous environments – Nimsoft allows customers to monitor and manage performance and availability across heterogeneous IT environments. They do so with a single, SaaS or on-premises-based infrastructure monitoring and management solution that spans both traditional data centers and virtualized and cloud environments.

Monitoring also has to span the stack and to this end Nimsoft monitors applications, servers, networks, databases and the end user experience via customizable portals, dashboards and reports.

Nimsoft Monitor tracks all the physical, virtual, and application elements of private cloud environments. Further, it combines sophisticated monitoring with lower administrative overhead—including automated discovery and monitoring. As a result, Nimsoft Monitor enables you to get the monitoring insights you need to quickly respond to outages, and even prevent them from happening in the first place.

Nimsoft realizes the strength that VMware has in the marketplace and to this end the release today will monitor both physical and virtual systems across public and private locations – on-premise data centers as well as remote clouds, be they IaaS or PaaS.

Nimsoft works by capturing capacity and performance data at customizable internals across multiple vCloud instances. It provides;

  • Automated discovery, deployment, configuration, and data aggregation for resources managed by vCloud Director
  • Templates for creating policies that can be applied to specific resource groups
  • Correlated monitoring of resources supporting specific applications and services―including virtual machines and virtual LANs
  • Multi-tenant views of performance, availability, utilization, and other key monitoring data

Of course the question needs to be asked as to why VMware itself doesn’t offer central monitoring and usage metering of multiple vCloud directors. It seems a logical functional area for them to do so – and quite potentially they may do this over time. The key proposition that Nimsoft will continue to espouse however is the neutral monitoring of heterogeneous resources – being the “Switzerland” for monitoring is attractive to many organizations who want to keep their technology stack and their monitoring tools at arms length.

 

 

 

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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