I
was researching a few sites related to Network Management and came across an
interesting article on Network technology trends in 2012 with specific relation
to Network Management. The author,

Jim Frey

,
Research Director at

Enterprise
Management Associates

[EMA] says, there are 3 key areas that one must look
at, in 2012:

1. Cross Domain management operations
   
   
   
   
2. SaaS based network management
3. 
   
   
   
   
   
   Performance SLAs in Cloud monitoring

You may refer to this link for details: 

http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/news/2240112990/Network-technology-trends-for-2012-Network-management?asrc=EM_NLN_16087464&track=NL-79&ad=859819&;;;;;;;

What constitutes this Cross Domain Management operations? It
is a combination of Network Operations Team and Applications and Servers Team. So,
why this new term / terminology? The reason is: Apart from the networks, the
applications are increasing in complexity and so are the servers with
virtualization technologies adding to the complexity. And, the latest buzzword
– the private cloud models in enterprises, demands

a new approach to network and infrastructure management

.

Next, who is adopting SaaS based network management and why?
According to the author, small to medium enterprises are slowly moving to the
SaaS model for obvious reasons of not having to maintain a network monitoring
and management tool and its servers. The cost benefits and maintenance benefits
seem attractive! 

Lastly, Public Cloud Providers would have a higher accountability to its enterprise clients. In addition to the availability SLAs which they provide now, they would also be expected to give performance based SLAs.

So, how is all this related to ManageEngine? The answer is in ManageEngine IT360. 

Cross Domain Management and ManageEngine IT360

IT360 is an Integrated IT management solution by ManageEngine designed to Monitor and Manage IT Infrastructure for Small, Medium or Large Enterprise. ManageEngine IT360 adds a business context to monitoring IT Resources, thereby helping the various stakeholders understand the impact of downtimes on the business.

ManageEngine IT360 is an integrated solution that monitors the networks, devices, servers, applications, VMs, traffic, etc.. In addition, it also has an integrated helpdesk module with ITIL components like Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, CMDB, Service Catalog, etc.. The best part of IT360 is its capability to create Business Service Grouping where you can group devices, applications, servers of your choice [or based on a specific business service]. And of course, you have alerting and notification mechanisms in place for any threshold violations, along with a powerful Reports Engine. The image shown below depicts the various modules of IT360 and it is self-descriptive… 

I believe IT360 does meet the first point of Cross Domain Management requirements!! 

ManageEngine IT360 MSP Edition as a means to SaaS based offering

ManageEngine IT360 is offered with the following editions: 

1.    IT360 Enterprise Edition for Enterprises

2.    IT360 MSP Edition for Managed Service Providers.

MSPs can offer managed services to its enterprise clients in 2 ways using the MSP Edition. One, by installing  Probe[s] at the clients’ LANs and two, by installing the Probe in their own NOC and perform a remote monitoring of the clients’ LANs; the latter meets the second point – SaaS based network management!! 

One more option here: the central server of IT360 MSP Edition can be hosted in a public cloud. The probe can be installed in a client’s LAN for monitoring.

Network Performance Management in ManageEngine IT360

ManageEngine IT360 also monitors public cloud services like the Amazon Web Services [AWS]. IT360 supports monitoring of the following cloud services: 

•    Amazon EC2 Instances

•    Amazon RDS Instances

The tool provides critical data on Incoming Traffic and Outgoing Traffic, Disk Read and Write operations. etc.. It also provides information on the Latency  – Read Latency and Write Latency, in addition to Read Bandwidth and Write Bandwidth usage pattern.

The same applies to monitoring of Amazon RDS instances.

So, ManageEngine IT360 is Trend Ready in 2012??… Like to know more?

Website: 

http://www.manageengine.com/it360/

Live demo:

 

http://it360demo.manageengine.com:8100/console/do/login?service=AppManager&furl=/

K.Lakshmi Shankar

You Can Learn More About the ManageEngine Product Line By Going to manageengine.optrics.com

The original article/video can be found at Network Management Trends in 2012 and ManageEngine IT360