Does this happen to you?

We often hear a scenario like that from people like you who want to evaluate IT360 but are unable to procure a server to run it, which prevents them from evaluating the product in a timely manner. So we’re eliminating this bottleneck for you and making it easier to evaluate our solution.

IT360, our unified monitoring software, is now available on the cloud for free evaluation. That’s right: we host it while you evaluate it.

So what do you get with the ​cloud-based evaluation of IT360?

We are providing a hosted instance of the IT360 Professional Edition for the evaluation. We have also provided a simulated environment to configure and monitor a few network devices, services, and applications. You can evaluate all the features of the product right from the discovery stage to the ​configuration of devices and alarms and the reporting of various KPIs. The service desk module allows you to test the ITSM functionality of IT360, from managing tickets to creating a CMDB from scratch.

​So what you waiting for? Go ahead, create an account, and unleash the power of Unified Monitoring with ManageEngine IT360. You can create your IT360 evaluation account here.

What if you don’t want the hosted model?

We understand that some of you still want to use and evaluate IT360 by installing it on your server and monitoring devices from your own network. That’s why we’re retaining our on-premise evaluation mode, too. You can download the free trial version here. Please select the “Download” option in the form to get the .exe file of IT360.

Please note that the hosted IT360 instance is available for evaluation only. You will still need to procure a server if you need to deploy it for production. We just hope that your IT team has a spare or that you have generous colleagues.

Cheers,
Suvish

The post IT360: The Unified Monitoring Solution You Can Now Evaluate in the Cloud appeared first on ManageEngine Blog.

Sabhlok launched the conference discussing how ManageEngine’s tools have been evolving to deliver real-time IT. How can IT organizations be quicker? How can IT organizations meet and shorten service levels through network management, server and application management, IT help desk and windows management, SIEM and compliance?

The keys to real-time IT, said Sabhlok, are:

• The right data at the right time
• Not just any data, but actionable data
• Instructions on what is wrong or what to do
• Data should be able to reduce my mean time to resolution (MTTR)

The Road to Real-Time IT

Both ManageEngine and the IT industry have evolved to achieve the goal of real-time IT. As Sabhlok points out:

Physical, virtual, and cloud management: We now have end-user experience monitoring for cloud apps.

On-demand SaaS solutions: ManageEngine’s help desk software, ServiceDesk Plus On-Demand

Mobility solutions: Just by the sheer fact that you don’t have to be in the office, mobile has allowed for a huge leap to real-time.

“Social IT” for enterprise: With the release of IT Pulse, ManageEngine merged the social experience, with IT collaboration, and real-time IT monitoring. As people in the IT enterprise are engaging, they’re getting alerts as to what’s happening around their IT enterprise. All of it is being done in real-time.

Integrated IT management: ManageEngine’s IT360: integrated IT management suite offers, as the name suggests, a 360 degree view of a single point of truth of your IT operations.

Real-Time IT Means Delivering Actionable Data

While blinking lights and spinning dials showing the health of your network are nice, they don’t provide any information for you to act on should there actually be an issue. IT management software has thankfully grown up offering context to the health of your network, and only giving alerts when an action needs to be taken.

Now that we’re able to measure everything, we’re collecting a lot of data. If the influx is too much for you to handle, set yourself up for success by managing “little data” not Big Data, said Sabhlok. Here are some of his suggestions for building a real-time IT environment:

• Start by asking what data do we need; what questions are we trying to answer for our business or organization.
• Seek management tools that not only monitor, but offer “actionable data.”
• Make sure needs are transparent to IT professionals and users.
• Use the data you already have first before you go seeking any other data.
• Use tools that can provide the data and reports that are important to the business.
• Don’t get distracted by “bells and whistles” of a vendor solution when what you really need are powerful reporting capabilities.
• Ask vendors if their products can answer the questions your business needs to know.

The post How to Respond to IT Issues in Real Time appeared first on ManageEngine Blog.

This Week’s Five is the column where we bring to you a collection of five interesting reads from all over the web, with a different topic every week. This week, we are exploring the changing role of Chief Information Officers (CIOs) in the enterprises.

Gone are the days when the CIOs were largely responsible for practices supporting the flow of information. Today, the role of a CIO has undergone a drastic change, where he plays a key role in setting the strategy and ensuring its execution. Since IT has moved from low to high priority, the CIO has become CEO’s ally, and in most cases, they drive business strategies together.

We have brought together some interesting articles we’ve come across in the past few days, about the transformation in a CIOs role .

The New Role Of CIOs: The IT sector’s expansion from mainframes to distributed servers moved CIOs beyond their chilled computer-room fortress to the user’s domain.

The Metamorphosis Of The CIO: Tomorrow’s businesses will have a very different make-up, and the CIO must lead the charge in the face of these changes. As Erik Brynjolfsson said, to succeed in the future, “We must reinvent our organizations and our whole economic system.”

CIOs Need To Rethink Their Roles: CIOs need to be business-savvy. But technology trends, generational shifts in the workforce and changing demands from end users are forcing CIOs to go further and fundamentally rethink their roles, according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan CIO Symposium

Strong Relationships Can Move The CIO Role To Transformational: CIOs must become experts in all things, especially in this era of disruptive technology. And in becoming experts, CIOs need to start taking the initiative to create relationships with users, customers and IT partners in addition to line-of-business colleagues.

Chief Information To Chief Insight Officer: The best way Chief Information Officers (Or CIOs) can regain past glory of their role is to adopt and grow with changing technology and evolve to become Chief Insights Officer – still a CIO!

So, if you are a CIO responsible for the management of IT in your enterprise, notice how your role has been transformed!

The post This Week’s Five: The Changing Role of CIOs appeared first on ManageEngine Blog.

Obviously, today’s Internet is filled with vast amounts of data. When only a few short years ago a search would yield varied results, today search engines, social networks and even advertisers have realized that information must be culled, filtered and targeted for their consumers. In order to do this, many of these services collect data about you. While it can feel creepy, only showing you relevant information can also save you time and reduce information-related frustration.

It’s really no different from our personal lives. Many researchers claim that too much information can lead to higher levels of stress and anxiety. It doesn’t take an expert to tell me how I feel when I walk into a cluttered office with stacks of unfiled paperwork on my desk.

Conversely, when I finally clean my office and put things in their rightful place, my anxiety turns to calm. Life feels very different when I have the documents, the phone numbers or the disk that I need right when I need it.

The fact is, the right data and the right time not only reduce stress but also boosts your productivity. And that goes for your company too. Especially since data growth for the average company is expected to increase by 650 percent over the next five years.

Businesses must approach data in a similar manner you would your personal life — cull and filter corporate data to meet your needs. I’m not talking about Big Data, with all the positive and negative associations that go with it. You can call it Little Data if you want. But the key point is that the data for this kind of actionable analytics is already available in most companies right now — it’s just not being leveraged.

You see, it doesn’t have to take a Big Data project to get valuable information out of your technologies. A lot of actionable analytics can (and should) come from the vendors that are already providing your network, systems, devices and applications.

For example, IT organizations can use Little Data in the form of the machine data generated by their systems to predict potential breaches to the corporate network. Think about it. Those applications currently used to monitor your network and user access capture huge amounts of data including the user name, their device information and location. But what can you do with it?

Say that your IT admin receives a report indicating a sales rep for New York has logged into the corporate network. However it’s 3AM…and he is apparently in Russia. That is actionable data and information that the security team should follow up on immediately. Or imagine if large amounts of data were suddenly being downloaded from your financial system by someone in customer service. IT would want to be alerted to that too.

It is important for every CIO to do a data health-check within his or her company. Having access to and leveraging this Little Data is equally as important as just having that data. You can understand what data you have and how it can help you without incurring any additional resources or costs.

Unfortunately, many companies are typically more focused on the bells and whistles and feeds and speeds than the reporting capabilities. When evaluating a technology, start thinking about things like its ability to capture data, provide robust canned reporting and ad hoc reporting capability. This actionable or Little Data will be the single most competitive differentiator a company can offer over the competition.

Otherwise, data will continue to grow exponentially in size — but not in value to you.

The post If Big Data’s too scary, try Little Data (it’s free) appeared first on ManageEngine Blog.

Log Monitoring/Analysis is already well known in the security and network management space. It is now beginning to gain prominence in the network operations space [Ack.: EMA Research]. The fact that every granular event is logged in real time means that you will find granular information at the device level and even at the session level. One of the advantages is, root cause analysis for certain situations becomes easier with log monitoring.

But, the challenge lies in the identification of the relevant logs from a “log storm”. The trick lies in identifying the situation or the usecase and the log string. Then, put them into a monitoring tool and get alerted when it happens! And, maybe, generate an incident/ticket instantly!

Network devices send out syslog messages, which can be directed to a recipient server. The sylogs thus directed, can be monitored.

ManageEngine IT360 is capable of monitoring syslogs and it is a lightweight feature that suits a network operations environment. [Well, it does not store all the syslogs received!]. In IT360, the syslogs from the devices and systems are not actually stored inside IT360 at all. It goes like this: the network and system administrator of the customer is asked to configure UDP port 154 for syslogs. IT360 listens to this port for syslogs. The device is configured to forward the syslogs to IT360 via this UDP port 154.

Now, IT360 parses these logs received in 154 and looks out for any matching strings, as configured and raises alerts, etc. It is these syslog messages that are converted into event alerts and are stored. And, rest of the syslog messages are not stored in IT360 at all.

You can receive syslogs from scores of devices!

Syslog+SNMP Traps+custom polling can be a great combination in Network Operations management. Truly a Unified IT Monitoring combination!

Here’s a 6 minute video on how syslog monitoring is configured in ManageEngine IT360:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_1H3ME4oB8?feature=player_detailpage]

K.Lakshmi Shankar

The post Log Monitoring and Network Operations appeared first on ManageEngine Blog.

But the need for integration does not stop there. When you think about it, we’re not just focusing on application and network performance solely for the sake of performance (though the nerd in each of us may think so). In today’s business environment, we’re focusing on performance because IT has become a service—and ultimately, we are the ones in charge of the delivery of that service.

Given that reality, does it make any sense to treat IT operations management and IT service management as distinct activities?

I submit that it does not, and the organization that finds ways to integrate IT operations management and IT service management will be in a stronger position to deliver the services that clients expect—whether they are internal business units or external subscribers.

Streamlining service delivery

Outside of IT, none of your clients appreciate the distinction between IT operations management and IT service management. They only care about whether what you do helps them get their jobs done. That’s important because to your clients, IT is a monolithic enterprise, a single service.

If the service they rely on starts to perform poorly and they call you, you can use your AA-NPM tools to identify the source of the problem. But if you then have to turn to a service management system to create and track a trouble ticket, if you have to manage technicians and other resources with yet another system, you lose the connection between the problem and the solution. You lose the ability to manage the entire service delivery ecosystem as one—and that ability is critical to the delivery of the highest quality of services to your clients.

Integrating IT operations management and service management enables you to view and manage these entities as one, aligning you and your operations with your client’s needs.

So how can you achieve this kind of integration? There are two basic ways to do this:

• Engage external consultants to integrate different point products and consolidate operational and service management data in a MOM console.
• Deploy an IT management solution that integrates IT operations and service management out of the box.

Do we need to dwell on why the first approach is least desirable?

The pain starts with the cost of engaging the consultants and grows as you manage the developers to integrate products that were never designed to co-exist in a highly demanding production environment. It grows even more acute as you struggle to manage the patches, upgrades, licenses, and so on that hide behind the “single pane of glass” that you have pieced together.

Deploying a solution that is integrated out of the box—what we call a “unified IT” solution—is much simpler, easier and faster to deploy, and less costly in both the near and long terms.

Broadly speaking, a unified IT environment provides the following functionality:

• The ability to create, open, process, and close tickets from operations
• The ability to poll all devices—irrespective of their category or classification—and report device status on a dashboard
• Automatic mapping of interdependencies and functional business relations
• The ability to manage the entire asset life cycle, with full reporting to enable informed renewal decisions
• Support of multi-platform and multi-vendor infrastructure, as well as the flexibility to add hardware, software, and other devices from ancillary vendors

The benefits of unified IT

For data center and NOC users, an integrated operations and service management solution enables distinct benefits:

• Enhanced data center operational efficiency, which increases the overall IT’s accountability to business
• Increased operational efficiency through proactive reporting, which can reduce mean time to repair (MTTR)
• Collaboration between operations and service management teams, ensuring that incidents are owned and managed to resolution according to SLAs

For service desk users, still other benefits arise:

• Deeper understanding of operational incidents and their impact on service delivery
• Increased accuracy when measuring incident times and service-level agreements
• Access to a centralized knowledge base, enabling the service desk to become a more integral—and fully integrated—part of the total fault-to-resolution process

For business users, there are still other benefits:

• Real-time visibility into action plans to address issues through improved incident communication
• Enhanced quality of service though seamless integration and end-user experience management
• Detailed trend analysis data on how IT is supporting business over time

Unified IT for a better end-user experience

In today’s highly competitive and demanding business, a focus on delivering outstanding service to the end user is the focus we need to adopt. End-user demands are changing, too, even as I write this—which argues for an approach to service delivery that enables maximum flexibility and agility. Unified IT provides that. It’s a true single pane of glass that provides insight into the entire IT infrastructure and enables all your IT users to engage in an organized and coordinated manner (which is, as we have noted, precisely what the client expects).

As before, though, I’ll leave this article off with an acknowledgement that, yes, there’s still more an IT organization can do to optimize and improve the user experience. Part 3 of this series will look at the role, place, and importance of a configuration management database (CMDB) in this evolving service delivery infrastructure.

Many IT managers view the CMDB as simply another tool on par with every other in the world of IT management. It’s not. It is the central hub that links all the assets involved in the delivery of the end-user experience and must be deployed as such for IT to deliver the highest levels of service both to end users and the clients whose applications they support.

Related links:

• The original article was posted in APM Digest: http://bit.ly/13apQp3
• More on ManageEngine’s unified story: http://bit.ly/hgK1Yr

The post Why you need to integrate IT operations and IT service management appeared first on ManageEngine Blog.

infrastructure components, as shown in the diagram below:

Traditional or stand-alone application performance management (APM) tools provide visibility

only into the middle component group, the application infrastructure. They typically support

auto-discovery of all the applications in the networks, transaction analysis, application usage

analysis, end-user experience analysis, and more. They also provide the basic functions to

monitor the health and performance of all configured application infrastructure assets.

But APM tools do not provide insight into the network infrastructure itself. Typically, network

infrastructure managers rely on separate network performance management (NPM) tools for

fault management, device monitoring, capacity planning, interface traffic analysis, configuration

management and those sorts of tasks.

The problem with a management approach that relies on two separate tools is that neither of

these tools is designed to facilitate the management of the interplay between these environments

— and to optimize the user experience of an application in this environment the interplay

between these infrastructures must be understood and well-managed.

That’s where an AA-NPM solution is critical. An AA-NPM solution integrates these vital entities and provides complete visibility into these business critical infrastructures and their dependencies. This insight can help organizations and IT executives gain:

1.      Better visibility into IT infrastructure

Executives using an AA-NPM solution can have a single dashboard view of their critical

business applications and underlying network infrastructure. Reporting can be run at a very

granular level, providing better visibility into Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and enabling

more well-informed decisions about device performance and usage. This has proven to be a great

benefit for the highly virtualized environment, where virtual machines often go underutilized.

2.      Clearer business co-relation

Integration into vital modules of IT allows business executives to better understand the value in

IT. Such integration enables IT teams to create business services composed of IT infrastructure

that are responsible for the health and availability of critical applications. It also becomes easier

for business executives to narrow down the cost involved in running such applications and to

understand the cost that will be incurred if the service goes down or goes offline for

maintenance.

3.      Faster troubleshooting of problems

One of the biggest challenges for IT professionals is to find the root cause of a problem. This

dilemma persists due to lack of insight into asset dependency. An AA-NPM solution enables an

engineer to drill into the deepest levels of the service delivery infrastructure and to troubleshoot

problems faster and more effectively than ever. Research has shown that integration enables the

deployment of better analytics, which in turn enables engineers to prepare for the future and

perform proper capacity planning during the peak usage hours.

4.      Improved user experience

Increasingly, today’s applications are built from loosely coupled components that can exist in

many different places and in many different infrastructure tiers — even within a single

organization. If an end user experiences a problem with an application, discovering the root

cause is complicated because of the different infrastructure tiers in place. To improve that

end-user experience, IT organizations need tools that can provide a comprehensive view of all

those infrastructure elements — and provide insight into how data and messages move between

those elements. To improve the user experience even before it degrades, it would be better to be

able to monitor the system proactively and find end-user experience problems before the end

users report them. If you were able to do that — and an AA-NPM solution can be a huge help —

you could eliminate many poor experiences before your users even encounter them.

5.      Enhanced productivity and optimal budget usage

With a unified console to manage network and application infrastructure, IT organizations can

find root cause problems more quickly and easily. This reduces mean time to repair (MTTR) and

improves overall quality of service. A unified AA-NPM solution also enables an organization to

eliminate the need for multiple tools (and avoids the expense of consolidating them). It can

reduce the complexity of the management environment, make better use of available budgets,

and improve collaboration and productivity.

The bottom line? AA-NPM tools effectively enable IT professionals to gain the insight they need

into the interplay of all the infrastructure elements that comprise the user experience of a

web-delivered application. They provide a mechanism for monitoring and managing application

and network infrastructure as a single entity.

Cheers,

Suvish

Related Links:

This article was originally posted in APM Digest: http://bit.ly/14L9IdX

More on ManageEngine’s Unified IT story: http://bit.ly/hgK1Yr

The post 5 Reasons You Should Consider Application-Aware Network Performance Management appeared first on ManageEngine Blog.

MSPs face tough competition in pricing, which reduces their profit margins. Apart from this, they also have the daunting task of keeping their client’s IT running with five-9 figures of availability! Oh, and I see the number of 9s just keep increasing, don’t they? In this stringent environment, MSPs have to look for various avenues to reach their customers.

A few of the avenues which MSPs can adopt to grow include:

1. Embrace the ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS) revolution

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) has picked up at a tremendous rate over the last few years, thanks to all the hype surrounding the cloud and cost benefits it provides to the small and start-up companies. According to the recent research by a leading firm, IaaS is the fastest growing market in the public cloud-services segment, which is set to grow at a rate of 45.4 percent in the coming year. MSPs can leverage this growth in moving their IT management services to the cloud by utilizing infrastructure from various IaaS vendors that have arrived in the market today. With the simple architecture of hosting the service in cloud, MSP do not have to worry about any of the following:

Cost of the infrastructure
Addressing the infrastructure-capacity-planning
Getting into details of setting up a private datacenter
Rolling out services faster than the time it takes to manage it in-house
2. Unify IT Management

The cost and reliability of services are seen as most critical aspects to run this business. Cost is due to the operations that include various tools, plus the skills required to run them.

Reliability is a critical aspect due to various following reasons:

Visibility into various modules
Environmental influence
All the above-mentioned problems can be addressed if the MSPs can view IT as one and are able to manage them as a single entity rather than working in silos. To enable this, MSPs have to look for the tool that can give the single pane of glass to monitor and manage customers’ IT infrastructure. Needless to say that the tool becomes more cost effective if can be deployed in the public cloud.

3. Expand Your Service Portfolio

I have seen many MSPs getting stuck in same vertical for several years and trying their best to increase the revenue and profit margins. Today, business runs on IT, and MSPs have the opportunity to run that. Most medium-sized MSPs limit their service portfolio with Desktop management/Anti-virus management or Patch management. There are several other services which are yet to be explored completely and Enterprises are looking out in the market to outsource them.

A few of them include:

Remote monitoring of the entire IT infrastructure
Network Operations Center (NOC) services
Mobile device management
Managed storage, back ups and disaster-recovery services
Help desk and Patch management
Cloud services (Hosted emails, storage, VDIs, Web site, etc.)
Financial and Banking sectors have been the sweet spot for MSPs over the years, but the core industries are looking for MSPs to outsource their IT so that they can concentrate on their business. Horizontal expansion lets MSPs to expand their sources to increase the revenue while using the expertise they gained by managing specific verticals.

4. Evaluate Your Vendor Selection

No MSP is complete without possessing a right tool and the tool is only as good as the vendor’s knowledge of specific market! Choosing the right vendor determines the success of the MSP.

A few of the areas that the MSPs must check before choosing the vendors include:

The relationship that the vendor has with channel partners;
The way vendor sees MSP market: For example: Checking the availability of specialized tools designed for MSP, which includes features like Customer segmentation, Unified console, Partner re-branding, high-availability module, etc.
Vendor flexibility: While deciding the service portfolio, it is important to check whether or not the vendor is flexible enough to discuss the roadmaps, listen to the suggestions in rolling out features, and has flexibility in licensing. In doing so, it becomes far more efficient than when compared to a vendor who would keep them in the dark.
5. Pursue Automation

It is a near impossible task to achieve efficiency and productivity for today’s business with the traditional approach. Hence the way out is to bring automation in to the existing tasks. One of the major concerns for MSPs is the cost and that can be brought down if the MSPs automate the repetitive tasks in a standardized way. This increases the number of devices managed by each technician.

MSPs must be able to automate all the objects in the runbook which will allow them to scale and efficiently utilize their skill-pool rather than indulging the resource in daily mundane and repetitive tasks.

Cheers,

Suvish

PS: The original article was posted in MSP mentor: http://bit.ly/X1W0On

The post 5 Ways MSPs Can Maximize Their ROI and Profit appeared first on ManageEngine Blog.

Many customers of DeviceExpert, especially the big enterprises that rely on enterprise CMDB as the centralized repository of critical data from  diverse applications, always wanted to integrate DeviceExpert with CMDB  to have a completely centralized, integrated,  holistic and consolidated change control and management.  To achieve this, DeviceExpert provides REST APIs, which allow third-party applications to extract data from  DeviceExpert and put them into CMDB and also trigger operations in  DeviceExpert as a reconciliation or troubleshooting measure based on the  ‘ground-realities’ in the CMDB.

The  comprehensive multi-vendor NCCCM capability of DeviceExpert, combined  with REST APIs can now provide critical feed to the enterprise CMDB  helping administrators gain enhanced visibility on the happenings in the  network and thereby achieve better management of network assets.

In  addition,  DeviceExpert integrates with ManageEngine’s flagship product  –  OpManager, the Network Monitoring Solution in the form of NCM  plug-in.  With REST APIs, customers can now leverage network  monitoring,  configuration management and change control in complete  alignment with  the enterprise CMDB, keeping it up-do-date with respect  to device  configurations.

In a significant benefit to the customers of OpManager with NCM Plug-in, the new set of APIs strengthen the workflow engine  in OpManager and help IT teams accelerate fault remediation through workflow-driven network automation.  Administrators will now be able to configure the workflow in such a way to rapidly respond to business  priorities. For instance, an alarm from a system to OpManager might mandate configuration backup of a particular device. This activity can now be automated as part of workflow leveraging the power of APIs.

APIs made available now help perform various tasks,  including inventory management (device addition and deletion);  configuration backup; compliance status; executing show commands on  devices; fetch device properties and executing templates and scripts that automate repetitive configuration tasks.

Trusted  by administrators across the globe, DeviceExpert automates many of the  manual tasks that had consumed the time of an organization’s IT and  network management teams. The availability of REST APIs strengthens  DeviceExpert’s functionality further and makes it a much more powerful  tool at the hands of network administrators enabling them take total  control of network device configurations.

Try DeviceExpert now!

Bala
ManageEngine DeviceExpert
Video Demo   |  Free Trial Download   | White Papers & Success Stories  | DeviceExpert integrates with OpManager as NCM Plug-in

The post Change Control Automation & Better Management of Network Assets appeared first on ManageEngine Blog.