IT Service Management
Keep the Business Running
Your organization relies on the services delivered by its IT infrastructure and if these processes are impaired, business can slow down or even stop running. We know this is stating the obvious, yet nonetheless, most enterprises use a collection of point products to monitor the different aspects/technologies of the infrastructure, and in some cases the alerts from these products are responded to by separate groups within the organization. If the health of the service is the goal, it is necessary to have a common layer of analysis across the point solutions, as well as something to “fill the gaps” that may exist. The analysis and correlation provided by this layer needs to determine which service is effected and the root cause of the issue. This is what NerveCenter can do for you.
Detect and address performance and availability issues with NerveCenter before they become failures
If a network interface is seeing errors that get progressively worse, performance degradation or an outage associated with that interface can result. If that link is the primary connection to a mission critical database, the problem can be catastrophic to your business. How many errors represent a potential problem - 10? 20? 100? And over what period of time? A better way to look at this is to calculate a rate of errors, then compare that rate to the overall traffic as a ratio. A sustained high ratio of error rate to traffic is a more accurate indication that a performance issue is imminent and that immediate maintenance steps are required before the DB is affected. The information regarding your network’s health is all there, but are you able to make sense of this enormous amount of data in real-time?
NerveCenter from OpenService eliminates information overload with real-time event correlation and root-cause analysis. It allows you to create an end-to-end model of your service that proactively monitors the health and performance of the underlying critical IT assets that make up the service. NerveCenter allows you to pinpoint the problems in your network, systems, applications, and databases, and apply the service context.
"We established a simple rule: No alarms go to network operators until NerveCenter makes them understandable. Our network can generate
four to six million events every day. We rely on NerveCenter to qualify and correlate those events so that we can understand the root
cause of problems and how to resolve them."
Rick Ferrante, Manager of Network Management Transaction Network Services (TNS)
Manage your environment your way
The reach of NerveCenter can extend as far into your IT infrastructure as you want to manage. Its intelligent SNMP and ICMP polling engine can be supplemented with data from virtually any other source of data such as syslog, log files, database tables, and custom APIs to give you complete visibility of your IT infrastructure and the health of its assets. By correlating this wealth of data, NerveCenter can alert you of potential issues that could impact your ability to do business before a single device has failed.
While no technology can automatically detect how you have structured your IT assets to support each of your business services – or rank their importance – we make it easy for you provide NerveCenter with that information. With a minimal investment of time to define your environment within NerveCenter, you receive the rewards of a system that is uniquely able to monitor the real-world quality of your IT infrastructure and the services it provides.
"The advantage of NerveCenter is that I get to tell it exactly what I want it to do. It’s not crawling through my network doing
who-knows-what to make guesses about the cause of service problems. NerveCenter leverages my knowledge about how I’ve organized my
network and services. As a result, NerveCenter is able to pinpoint problems with precision that other products cannot match."
Manager of Network Management US Telco Company
Define your IT management practices and policies using a GUI
A graphical interface enables you to define your unique management practices and policies in NerveCenter behavior models. These models give NerveCenter the intelligence to analyze a wealth of data and alert your IT staff of “real” issues. These models are quick to create and easy to adapt as your environment changes and as your monitoring requirements evolve. If your current management platform doesn’t include a monitoring capability you desire, in most cases you can implement it in NerveCenter.
Choose NerveCenter actions to notify staff – even fix problems
As NerveCenter correlates information from each of your critical IT assets, it can identify problems that are too subtle to trigger alerts from any individual element. When NerveCenter detects an “issue of interest,” there is no practical limit to the actions you can direct it to take:
- Send notifications via pager or email
- Send an alert to a management platform such as OpenService InfoCenter, HP OpenView, or IBM Tivoli Netcool
- Store the information for reporting at a later time by writing it to a file or database
- Script your own unique solution, including corrective actions written in Perl
The ability to correlate your site information with data from every possible source - and then act on it in any number of ways - is the reason why hundreds of the most complex IT environments rely on NerveCenter.
Run NerveCenter on any of the following platforms:
- Sun Solaris/SPARC
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003
- HPUX/PA-RISC
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 32-bit
NerveCenter is particularly effective in conjunction with popular network management platforms:
- OpenService InfoCenter
- HP OpenView Network Node Manager
- IBM Tivoli Netcool
Data input sources and protocols include:
- SNMPv1, SNMPv2, SNMPv3
- ICMP
- IPv4, IPv6
- OpenService Device Adapters such as log files, syslog, database tables, etc