Management appliance taps Web 2.0 technology

ScienceLogic Tuesday announced the next release of its IT management appliance, which lets IT managers add events, alerts and trouble tickets to their daily RSS feeds.

Founded in 2003, ScienceLogic packages its software on an appliance, dubbed EM7 (for enterprise management times 7), which company representatives say combines fault, performance, asset, configuration and service desk capabilities as pre-integrated applications on one device.

In EM7 Version 4.2, an RSS feature lets IT managers set up custom notifications, which IT managers can view in their browsers and click on to gain more detail about an event or alarm. The company says this customizable feature enables IT managers to reduce the number of irrelevant e-mail alerts cluttering their in-box and more quickly deliver data to their handheld devices.

"We built this connector that lets IT managers customize and personalize the events, alerts and reports they would like to receive via RSS feeds," says David Link, ScienceLogic founder and CEO. "That way IT managers can get streaming events in their RSS readers about the data they care most about, the data most pertinent to their daily jobs."

Also in this release, ScienceLogic increased its database management capabilities with a feature called Dynamic Applications. This feature lets users create monitoring templates of databases and the applications that run on them to gain access to performance data.

"EM7 looks at very specific attributes of how a database is performing and what's happening with the information in the database," Link explains. "The Dynamic Applications feature uses a fingerprinting approach we have that lets IT managers set up how they manage IT elements in ways that make sense to their business."

EM7 installs on a network and performs an auto-discovery process. It collects data from managed devices by using ICMP, SNMP, syslog, traps, WBEM, WMI, XML and now RSS. The appliance also can be configured to receive data using those same methods and protocols, including inbound RSS feeds.

Link says ScienceLogic has more then 60 customers and that part of the reason the company has been able to lure customers away from competitors such as CA, HP and IBM because of EM7's simple install and ease of use. "We have built quite a bit of connectivity into the appliance to accept and distribute data to customers' existing management tools," he says.

Scheduled to be generally available April 2, EM7 4.2 is priced starting at $25,000 for a first-tier appliance.