MasterCell promises mastery over IT services

As many of you know, root-cause analysis and automated fault resolution have been an area of particular interest for me. It's sad to see that with the exception of SMARTS and a few other vendors, this market has struggled as much as it has.

Innovators are often discounted because of their small size and possible instability, even with worthwhile approaches. Of course, some products did not evolve quickly enough to survive the downturn. Small companies with visionary products not ready for showtime got hit hard.

With that in mind, it pleases me to focus this column on one of the more worthwhile innovators and something of a success story: IT Masters.

IT Masters' MasterCell deliberately stays away from "root-cause," which the company feels is too network-centric. Its own "roots" are in systems event automation, and so MasterCell's design point is unusual, well suited to large enterprises with other management investments seeking to rein in operational costs and to more effectively automate service availability across an infrastructure.

MasterCell adapts to adjustments in production-level environments and can export events to a relational database. But it doesn't yet do historical reporting, trending or analysis.

IT Masters has done an exceptionally good job of identifying critical "role players" who can profit from its capabilities. Each person gets a targeted set of reports and screens. These include operations center personnel seeking to manage infrastructure availability in real time, help desk personnel seeking superior support for service calls, service managers seeking a clear overview of real-time service availability, and "users" seeking visibility into contracted services (both within the enterprise and from external sources).

With headquarters both in Austin, Texas, and Brussels, Belgium, it's not surprising that IT Masters' customers are distributed across both continents, often in financial institutions, but MasterCell is also supporting a healthy mix of other enterprise verticals and service providers, as well.

IT Masters expects its customers to have other vendors' products and leverages those products in MasterCell. It is designed to tap data sources from Tivoli, BMC Patrol, HP OpenView, CA Unicenter, Peregrine ServiceCenter, Remedy ARS, and Dirig Fenway. It has custom adapters as well. The product also can import events directly through adapters for NT event logs, file log adapters for Unix or Windows platforms, and of course SNMP traps from network sources.

At the heart of MasterCell's design are flexible, lightweight event processors that can run on nondedicated hardware and can support up to 500 events per second. Every transaction is logged and then committed to local files, saving the need for an added relational database. This "cellular," peer-to-peer architecture enables failover - and prevents having a single point of failure. One drawback, which IT Masters recognizes, is that these event processors do not yet have a central point for automated distribution and installation.

On the other hand, IT Masters has a sophisticated and effective approach to user administration with its Configuration Server. The MasterCell Configuration Server can leverage Lightweight Directory Access Protocol to support user authentication, role-based security, user preferences and licensing.

IT Masters does not claim that MasterCell works "out of the box" - an admission which is, I suppose, refreshing. What MasterCell provides is an automated, adaptive environment for automation policies to function within (the Dynamic Data Model), so that rules can relate in plug-and-play fashion to a wide variety of environments or changes in environments, and so that they can be amended dynamically without shutting down the system. IT Masters also provides its own MasterCell Rules language, and a Graphical Configuration Editor - making developing rules more a "paint by the numbers" process than in more traditional event management systems.

MasterCell GUIs are effective and, as I indicated, targeted at specific user types. Those supporting administrators are flexible and easily navigated, but won't win any awards at the Whitney Biennial. On the other hand, the service views are strong graphical representations with easy drill-down, so that service failure interdependencies are easily and automatically viewable in real time.

MasterCell is a strong product for large enterprises seeking effective control of their services. Installations can range from $50,000 to $250,000, but then this is a strategic investment with significant operational and business advantages. If you're seeking control over infrastructure service availability beyond the network - and if you want to consolidate and enhance existing management investments - MasterCell should definitely be on your short list.

Dennis Drogseth is a director with Enterprise Management Associates, a leading analyst and market research firm based in Boulder, Colorado, focusing exclusively on all aspects of enterprise management. Dennis has extensive experience in network management platforms and products and is researching trends in management software and changing IT roles internationally. His 18-plus years of experience in high-tech includes positions at IBM and Cabletron. He has been quoted in the press and is a speaker at industry events. He can be reached via e-mail.

Audrey Rasmussen is a research director with Enterprise Management Associates in Boulder, Colorado, a leading analyst and market research firm focusing exclusively on all aspects of enterprise management. Audrey has more than 20 years of experience working with distributed systems, applications and networks. Her current focus at EMA is e-business, SMB/SME and MSPs. She can be reached via e-mail.

Enterprise Management Associates in Boulder, Colorado, is a leading analyst and market research firm focusing exclusively on all aspects of enterprise management software and services.