Nimsoft Expands Unified Monitoring Coverage, Enhances Management Interface

CAMPBELL, Calif., June 23. Nimsoft, a business unit of CA Technologies, today announced enhancements to the Nimsoft Unified Monitoring architecture that enable customers to better monitor and manage critical business applications across all types of infrastructure--from the data center to the cloud--including SaaS, hosted and virtualized environments.

The main enhancements are q Unified Monitoring Portal that provides customizable Web 2.0 dashboards and reporting, as well as expanded resource coverage that enables the Nimsoft Unified Monitoring solutions to gather monitoring data from more than 100 systems, devices, and services--including Google's cloud-based applications and Rackspace cloud offerings. "Customers have recognized the tremendous value Nimsoft provides by delivering a single view of both the internal data center and external cloud-based services," said Gary Read, senior vice president and general manager of the Nimsoft Business Unit at CA Technologies. "With these enhancements, we are further augmenting that value proposition by adding to the resources we can monitor, and providing even more sophisticated ways to view and understand today's increasingly complex and dynamic IT environments."

With the release of the Unified Monitoring Portal, customers gain a comprehensive, intuitive, Web-based interface. Customers can instrument and view the monitoring of their internal data center, and their internal and external cloud-based services. By using industry-standard portal and portlet technology, the Unified Monitoring Portal provides access to Nimsoft information, along with information and the GUI from third parties that have written to those standards. Customers will have the ability to customize the portal as their needs and IT roles dictate.

  The expanded monitoring coverage is delivered in three new offerings:
  --  Power Monitor --enables users to monitor data center power efficiency
      and UPS status through a single dashboard. The solution provides
      insights into the cost and availability of power, which has become a
      critical consideration as IT seeks to meet volatile business demand
      with constrained resources in virtualized environments. This solution
      monitors specific SNMP values from uninterruptible power supplies,
      power distribution units, and automatic transfer switches for APC
      devices. Support for other power unit manufacturers' devices will be
      added over time.
  --  googleAppEngine and googleApps monitoring --enables users to monitor
      Google's cloud-based applications. Administrators will be able to
      monitor domain performance of Google Apps and the status of the Google
      AppEngine application.
  --  Rackspace cloud monitoring --enables users to monitor infrastructure
      that they obtain as a service from Rackspace. Nimsoft monitors
      Rackspace Cloud Servers and Cloud Files (storage) that are integrated
      with the Limelight content delivery network (CDN). As a result,
      Nimsoft customers who use Rackspace can measure the performance of
      their cloud computing infrastructure--including server usage,
      deployment efficiencies, latencies, disk usage, file upload/download
      bandwidths, and even the real-time cost of cloud resources--in an
      integrated manner with their other resources.

"As demand for QTS cloud services continued to grow, we recognized that pre-virtualization tools were not suitable for managing heterogeneous environments. After evaluating alternatives, we selected Nimsoft Unified Monitoring, which allows us to provide transparency to our clients for their infrastructure and applications," said Kurt Stoever, QTS vice president of service support. "QTS' deployment of the Nimsoft Unified Monitoring Portal and Unified Reporter provides the tools our customers need to ensure the performance and reliability of their entire IT infrastructure; both virtual and physical." These new offerings augment the comprehensive monitoring coverage of Nimsoft Unified Monitoring solutions, which can monitor core enterprise assets--including networks, databases, applications and virtualized environments.