Nimsoft announces Unified Manager product
Solution merges service management and infrastructure monitoring services
By Beth Schultz | Network World US | Published: 12:10, 07 April 2011
When you think about IT disciplines, bringing together infrastructure monitoring and service management makes good sense.
This is something that ManageEngine, for example, has offered with links between its OpManager network monitoring software and ServiceDesk Plus help desk software. Now such integration is available by Nimsoft, too.
On Tuesday, Nimsoft unveiled its first service desk offering, which includes configuration and change management components, as well as a configuration change management database (CMDB), says Chris O'Connell, director of product marketing at Nimsoft. Nimsoft Service Desk combines with Nimsoft Monitoring under the new Nimsoft Unified Manager, he adds.
"Customers kept explaining to us, 'Look with ITIL 3.0, there are a number of use cases, like incident, problem and change management, where we need collaboration between the infrastructure person and the business person who wants answers'. This is usually done with kludge orchestration products, and we felt it was time to cut away all that and allow these business processes to occur in a more fluid manner," O'Connell says.
David Coyle, a research vice-president at Gartner, sees significance in such integration. "Flexible, unified solutions that promote integration between monitoring and management will be key selection criteria over the coming years," he said in a prepared statement.
Nimsoft has built the unified tool on a lightweight, multitenant architecture that provides a one-stop window into ITIL-based workflows and performance management information, O'Connell says.
"Customers can open tickets and track their progression. They get a topology map, with information pulled from the CMDB. Colored dots are simple traffic lights about the health of resources, driven by the performance monitoring product. And they also classic network performance management information about the elements of a service," he describes.
"And, of course, it's all very integrated," he adds. "If a problem occurs on the performance side, a service ticket automatically opens. If a customer closes a ticket, the performance management piece knows to close down the alarm in the NOC."
While such integration is somewhat novel today, Nimsoft also is changing the game on the service management side. It's offering IT service management (ITSM) via the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model or as on on-premises package, and will let enterprises mix and match between the two.
Its ITSM SaaS pricing is quite aggressive, with a monthly cost of less than $100 per user. "We're benefiting because of the one architecture, so we can get economies of scale and turn around that for a low subscription price," O'Connell says.
