Nimsoft Tools Monitor Private and Public Clouds

Data center monitoring tools and cloud computing are frequently buzzed about in the industry today. Nimsoft, purchased last year by CA Technologies, is in the marketplace with "IT Management as a Service" or ITMaaS, which gives clients the ability to see into cloud-based applications as well as other mission critical applications.

"These are new environments, not built the way a traditional data center was built," said Andy Kicklighter, Senior Principal Product Manager at Nimsoft. "In a traditional environment, you had separate tools for email, databases, and so on. Those tools used their own resources. Now with virtualization and the cloud, the requirements are different."

Kicklighter presented on "Best Practices for Private Cloud and Virtualization Monitoring" on Tuesday at the Gartner Data Center & IT Operations Summit in Las Vegas.

He explained the six most pressing problems these environments pose:

1. Compute Density
2. Highly Variable Environment
3. Mission Critical Applications
4. Connections beyond the Virtual
5. Communicating Value
6. High Costs of Multiple Tools

For his slide deck and more details, visit Nimsoft's blog.

Nimsoft provides monitoring services and service desk solutions primarily to service providers, but enterprises are customers as well. The company's services are used to find and solve issues in their own data center as well as private and public cloud environments. Nimsoft can be installed on premises, and there's also a Software as a Service option.

"The monitoring services are designed to allow clients visibility into whatever they are using for cloud - Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Rackspace," Kicklighter said. "They also have connection capabilities to allow partners with specific expertise to also have access."

He said there are 1,000 clients using Nimsoft, with 60 percent of them in the service provider category and 40 percent enterprises. Nimsoft has customers around the globe including 1&1 Internet, CDW, SoftLayer, SunGard Availability Services, Sur La Table, TriNet and Virgin America.

Recently, Honda Motorcycle and Power Equipment of Austrailia announced it has deployed Nimsoft Monitor across its infrastructure. Nimsoft Monitor is a component of Nimsoft Unified Manager, a multi-tenant ITMaaS.

"We will continue to grow our solution set, as the modular platform allows us to easily add more," Kicklighter said about the company's outlook for 2012.