ITRS Field Assessment

My first experience of managing an ITRS application management deployment project was very interesting. ITRS Geneos is suitable for application services such as mid / front office applications because ITRS offers a simple management system framework i.e. ActiveConsole, powerful compute engine & netprobe. ITRS is usually bought by the application support service organisation who then has complete control and ownership - this allows them to rapidly deploy the monitoring solutions with little intervention from Group Enterprise Management.

However, the monitoring solutions that have been deployed were standard CPU, Disk, Memory, Process, Logfile and Market Data components. The BIG question is "what is so special about ITRS that demands such a high COST?".  Well ITRS offers a good management system framework, plugins like APIs to monitor C++ and JAVA apps, MDS apps etc but only the MDS plugins are unique.

I have deployed many enterprise management tools such as IBM ITM6, BMC Patrol 7, Nimsoft Nimbus and HP Sitescope which means that I am qualified to draw a conclusion "any enterprise that is willing to invest a little time, money and creative engineering up front with a dissolution support model could achieve a similar result using existing monitoring tools because these tools are likely to offer an API builder etc"... and save themselves a fortune in license cost and not to mention a single monitoring agent and single vendor to manage.

Firescope tool - assessment update #1

I was very impressed with Firescope after hearing some of the speakers speaking highly of their technology. I thought that I should test it out but had a minor issue in my first attempt at getting Firescope demo VM running. It was during this period that I realised that their customer service was top - customer focus and very willing to help. My plan is to put Firescope side by side with Managed Objects. Firescope was selected by Sky after they assessed 9 different vendors from the big 4 to many emerging vendors.

BarCap and Deutsche Bank

News of the month is both giants are now a customer of Nimsoft who has sold an additional 10,000 plus more licenses to Barcap (Lehman) and DB has just signed the ELA.

Mitch - was it an accident?

Vendor (Nimsoft) meeting

I 've had the pleasure of meeting a Nimsoft management board member (Mark Rivengton) yesterday who seems to be open and curious about what the vendors think of Nimsoft and management systems in general. I realised that during our discussion that Nimsoft's goal is to become the next Micromuse. This is ambitous but hey I liked Netcool when it was owned by Micromuse. I miss working with young and dynamic vendors like Muse and Managed Objects so I hope they will survive from any acquisition. Nimsoft marketing machine has been working hard to promote Cloud Computing, got lots of invitations from them. I am a big fan of Cloud Computing and I have been talking about it with other people for years. One day 'ESM on Cloud' will become a reality.

Nimsoft Nimbus tool - assessment

An admirable, solid tool and a force to be reckoned with - watch this space as Nimsoft will go very far. IBM (Tivoli ITM) fearest competitor.

Firescope tool - assessment

Couldn't get the Firescope VM to work.

ITRS Geneos tool - assessment

I have got a rare opportunity to assess 'Geneos', an application intrumentation tool that is mainly used by the financial companies' market data service. At first sight it seems straightforward but under the hood, it has some powerful and specific probes and plug-ins that make it unique.