Readers’ choice: SLM tools

Continuing with my Reader’s Choice series, this week I’m focusing on service-level management and business process management tools recommended by our readers.

For those just tuning in to this series, I asked our readers to submit their favorite management tools in a variety of categories and I’m reporting back with their recommendations, as well as some of their comments on why they like these tools.

Silas Reveille from Silas Technologies was recommended by a user because it could solve application monitoring problems more quickly. As this reader says:

“Not only was the product very quick and easy to implement, but it was also less expensive than the other solutions… The fact that Silas Reveille was powerful yet agentless and cost-effective was a huge differentiator for us. Using Silas Reveille to diagnose when and where outages occur has significantly decreased the amount of resources and time it takes to troubleshoot and ensure systems are up and running at all times… We would recommend the product to anyone looking to gain an edge by engaging in service-level management.”

One of our readers recommends Formula from Managed Objects. He likes Formula’s top-down approach, “putting focus on the right and most important things to watch/monitor/manage – that is, the critical business processes of your company… and how IT supports them.” He likes its open and object-oriented architecture that provides “great flexibility and independency in establishing the right and needed properties, algorithms, thresholds, key performance indicators, etc.” He says that these are coupled with those “elements that need to be managed for successful operation and business.” He concludes: “With this kind of software design you can reach your goal of aligning IT with business in the most optimal way, since Formula can cover both (IT) and business status in the same view.”  

Two interesting recommendations that I wouldn’t have expected to be in this category came from a reader who recommended Tripwire for Servers-Manager and Tripwire for Network Devices as his favorite tools in business service/process management. He says, “Ops guys love Tripwire… this is definitely far more than a ‘security’ tool. Many would argue, and I agree, that effective security has more to do with repeatable, verifiable operational processes than with the deployment of ‘security software.’”

Here’s how his organization uses these products:

“We leverage Tripwire to close the loop on change management, release management and problem management across both our infrastructure and that of our clients. We do this by using Tripwire to provide instrumentation of all actual change-related activity, which we then reconcile to approved change orders and trouble tickets. We also leverage Tripwire to provide us with the assurance that freshly provisioned systems match a known good build state, and that once they are deployed into production that they remain in the same known good build state… We use Tripwire to help us rule change in or out early in the problem management cycle, which has drastically reduced our Mean Time to Repair and increased our Mean Time Between Failures… Tripwire is one of the few tools that we have deployed that has paid us back in spades (in increased uptime and change success rate).” 

Another reader recommended Concord eHealth. He likes its “readymade and really useful historical reports.”

So these are our readers’ favorite SLM and business process management tools. Many thanks to our readers who submitted their recommendations.