* Nimsoft beefs up its unified monitoring software with new portal and new metrics, including cost
Enterprise IT organizations fearful about how they might one day monitor and manage application workloads they let out into the public cloud would do well to watch what their smaller counterparts are doing. A variety of tools vendors, new and old, are busy developing software that brings cloud monitoring to the mid-market.
One such company is Nimsoft, a recent CA acquisition that counts “emerging enterprises” and service providers among its customers. The Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS) gives IT shops the ability to monitor and manage all business applications, whether those reside within an internal data center, live within a hosting center or are delivered as a service. Late last month, Nimsoft enhanced its NMC offering with a customizable Web 2.0 NMS front end, called Unified Monitoring Portal, that brings together the administrative capabilities tuned to the enterprise with the dashboard and multitenancy functionality created for service providers.”We’re seeing a supply chain of IT, where an enterprise might get VoIP from one provider, cloud from another, and run different internal data centers too, growing over the next three to four years — there’s a real true breakup of IT coming,” says Chris O’Connell, director of product marketing for Nimsoft. “We want to be right in the middle of that, to let enterprises be able to connect to different service providers and still get a seamless view of the supply chain.”
Dennis Callaghan, a senior analyst at The 451 Group, says many other monitoring vendors want a place in this new world, too. The companies, each which brings its own particular twist, include a range of newbies and more established players including Akorri, Cloudkick, Makara, Monitis, ScienceLogic and Uptime Software, to name but a few, he says. (Read about results from Network World’s recent test of cloud management wares.)
For its part, Nimsoft also rolled out three new monitoring offerings. The first is Power Monitor, which lets users monitor data center power efficiency and UPS status and provides insights into the cost and availability of power — certainly welcome information to any enterprise IT shop struggling to curb energy spending and boost infrastructure efficiencies.
In addition, for Google users, Nimsoft is now offering the ability to monitor domain performance of Google Apps and the status of the Google AppEngine application. And, for enterprises that rely on Rackspace’s infrastructure as a service cloud offering, NMS now monitors Rackspace Cloud Servers and Cloud Files that are integrated with the Limelight content delivery network. That means they can view performance metrics such as server and disk usage, latencies and file upload/download bandwidth, O’Connell says.
Notably, with the Rackspace coverage, users also can monitor the real-time cost of their cloud resources. This is an interesting metric to monitor and The 451 Group expects to see a lot of activity around it, Callaghan says.
“Everybody is trying to make decisions about where they’re going to run workloads — on what internal or external resources — and cost will drive a lot of those decisions,” he says. “So giving you some idea of how much it’s going to cost to run your workload out on Rackspace is a powerful metric to offer at this point.”
The cloud monitoring field is rife with new products. Which have you tried out. E-mail and let me know.
