Blue Saffron Service Monitoring

One of the primary foundations of successful IT management is the measurement and reporting of contractual performance against an agreed service level - there can be many dimensions to this -

Service Level Type

This might involve reporting variously against service Availability (e.g. have my services exceeded the agreed uptime), Performance Monitoring (e.g. how long is the average response time of a server)). Request based (e.g. how long did it take to complete a process , for example respond to an incident), and External Compliance Monitoring (e.g. access data processed by third party, did I fullfill).

Location of the service itself

The broadening scope and availability of applications run and delivered remote from customer premises as “Cloud” and “Software as a Service (SaaS)” combined with the promise of lower cost of ownership and simpler integration process are driving many companies to consider hybrid IT environments to support their business requirements. For many companies today’s business applications are running ona mix of SaaS, cloud, and managed environments, as well as in virtualized environments and the legacy datacenter,. The most prevalent of these business applications are currently email, accounting, customer services and sales force automation.

Who manages the service

This could be internal to a company or lodged with a number of third party providers.

A typical arrangement for management responsibility is illustrated below:

The net result of this can be complexity – a unified or overarching visibility hard to achieveand or many companies, it has traditionally been difficult to cost effectively monitor and manage service level delivery. With traditional monitoring solutions, monitoring a business service housed entirely in the internal data center was often difficult in its own right. Much of the frustration with legacy solutions is that, to get a full view of the performance and availability of an internal business service, IT needs to deploy anywhere from 6 to 12 products with added dimension that in many instances management responsibility can be varied by service platform.

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The solution: As a managed service provider Blue Saffron provide visibility into the performance of its services but importantly can further extend this capability to encompass third party and internal arrangements aand further drive measurement to complex areas (e.g. end user experience monitoring) only normally associated with high end (and expensive) systems.. We use a number of industry leading tools and techniques to track service performance and SLA - , prime amongst these are products and services from Nimsoft (advanced monitoring) , Kaseya (monitoring and management) and ICCM (service desk).

Through the Nimsoft Monitoring Solutions (NMS) Blue Saffron is capable of delivering the visibility needed to monitor and manage performance across all these environments—

With its combination of comprehensive coverage, ease of use, and scalability, NMS enables organizations to leverage existing and emerging technologies and services, with unprecedented agility and ROI.

A fuller description of system capabilities illustrated below:

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a). Unified Monitoring Portal

Through Nimsoft Blue Saffron provides an intuitive, Web 2.0-based mechanism to interact with the Monitoring Solution, the centre of which is the unified monitoring portal.

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From this drill down into the detail of infrastructure and applications – the possibilities are boundless.

These features are complemented by customised customer dashboards, which can provide an integrated IT and business overview of service levels and monitoring within a diverse , some samples are shown below:

b), Business and Service Level Monitoring

NMS for SLAs tracks operations and business service levels against SLA metrics, and forecasts violations with warning alerts. The product is uniquely positioned to support ITIL and other quality initiatives.

Some sample reports are shown below:

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End User response Time monitoring

The Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS) for end user response enables organizations to get comprehensive and accurate insights into the levels of performance end users actually receive from the IT infrastructure.

There are two end user response monitoring solutions:

active monitoring and
passive monitoring.

These solutions can be used individually or in tandem. Used in tandem, these complementary solutions offer the most complete end user monitoring picture available in the industry.

Active monitoring

With Nimsoft’s active monitoring solutions, administrators can set up automated, synthetic transactions that consistently and repeatedly mirror actual end user interactions with a given IT service. This solution is ideal for creating a constant, predictable baseline for monitoring user performance.

A sample visualisation of an end to end monitoring process is shown below:

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Passive Monitoring

Nimsoft’s passive monitoring solutions measure the performance that real end users are actually experiencing at any given point in time. This solution monitors applications through passive network analysis, inspecting all packets, and measuring the intervals between a request and a response, for example. The technology is R(eal) U(ser) M(onitoring) or RUM.

d). Datacenter and network monitoring

NMS delivers comprehensive monitoring insights in these areas:

Virtualization:

NMS enables administrators to monitor and fully optimize their virtual environments, featuring solutions for all major server virtualization vendors, including VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, IBM, and Sun.

NMS Features	VMware VSphere and VirtualCenter	MS Hyper-V	Citrix XenServer	Sun Solaris Zones	IBM PowerVM
Agentless
Resource pools and resource controls
Template-based checkpoint and QoS measurements

Applications

With NMS, organizations can monitor all their critical applications, including Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, and IIS; Lotus Notes; SharePoint; VoIP; Citrix; WebSphere; and many others.

Servers

With NMS, organizations can monitor all their critical applications, including Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, and IIS; Lotus Notes; SharePoint; VoIP; Citrix; WebSphere; and many others.

Databases

NMS provides real-time and comprehensive database health check monitoring for Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase, MySQL, DB2, Informix, and more.

Networks

NMS delivers comprehensive monitoring coverage of the entire network infrastructure, including Cisco IPSLA; DNS, DHCP, and LDAP; SNMP; routers and switches; and traffic.

e). Private Cloud Monitoring

There is much work being performed within the confines of the organisational firewall, with the ability to exhibit fine grained control over resources and security and priority the growth of these has been phenomenal;

Nimsoft solutions allows rapid deployment within this environment and unparalleled scalability. Through its API It is possible to build new application probes. The full suite of visualisation and service level features can be deployed within this environment.

f). Public Cloud Monitoring

The Nimsoft solution offers excellent support for various public cloud services:

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Software as a Service (SaaS)

A sample of commercially available applications is below, Nimsoft has integrated with many of these right out of the box.

Key to success in this arena have been the applications API’s, scalability and speed of setup – and again the ability to provide unified view of disparate data sources.