Monitoring Solutions that Take Managed Service Providers’ Business to the Next Level

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In a market poised for explosive growth, today’s Managed Service Providers have a lot of opportunities—and a lot of competition. Those that gain an edge today are poised for leadership in a market that’s expected to be much larger in the years ahead.

In this environment, monitoring capabilities can play a vital role in the type—and quality—of services provided. That’s why 170 of the most successful Managed Service Providers and Hosting Providers around the world have turned to Nimsoft. Only Nimsoft offers IT monitoring solutions that enable you to…

  • Fuel business growth through advanced monitoring of servers, networks, databases, applications, and virtually anything else that is accessible through your client’s network.

  • Harness unmatched scalability—with fast, reliable, and efficient monitoring of hundreds of clients and tens of thousands of devices.

  • Differentiate your service portfolio through sophisticated SLA monitoring, customizable reports, and business dashboards that accentuate value.

  • Speed service delivery through a streamlined, robust architecture that supports multiple clients with unparalleled performance, flexibility, and security.

  • Deliver premium, value-added services, such as monitoring of virtualized and VoIP environments, that help boost margins.

Fuel Business Growth

“We are thrilled about this partnership with Nimsoft. By using NimBUS, BAIS has increased revenue by offering customers new solutions and is better satisfying customers’ needs through enterprise-grade solutions and improved infrastructure monitoring.”
—Tom Wye, CEO and VP of Network Operations, BAIS

Many Managed Service Providers get their start offering a specific service. Over time, they add new service offerings, and new tools to support those services. After several years, it’s common for a Managed Service Provider to be using several monitoring solutions, for example one for Cisco network devices, one for Windows servers, etc.

With Nimsoft, Managed Service Providers can adopt one tool for all their monitoring needs. As a result, they can offer more consistent, cohesive reporting across service lines, streamline administration, and significantly reduce the time spent on training.

Nimsoft provides over 100 IT monitoring probes, offering probes for …

  • Networks, including routers, switches, firewalls, and VoIP.

  • Servers on such platforms as Windows, Linux, UNIX, Netware, AS400, and VMware.

  • Databases such as Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM Informix, and IBM DB2.

  • Applications like Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft IIS, Active Directory, Citrix, WebSphere, JBoss, home-grown applications, and much more. 

In addition, Nimsoft solutions can easily be used to monitor virtually any devices that comprise the client’s broader infrastructure, including computer room temperature sensors, backup power systems, access points, and surveillance cameras—virtually anything with an IP address. Ultimately, if a device’s performance and reliability matter to your clients, you can monitor it with Nimsoft.

Managed Service Providers can leverage this broad solution set to expand their business—both by offering more services to their existing client base, and by adding new customers through accommodating the needs of a much broader array of client infrastructures. Plus, by building business on top of a single vendor solution, Managed Service Providers can eliminate the need for myriad point solutions and so build a more efficient, consistent, and profitable service delivery operation. 

Harness Unmatched Scalability

“With a single tool we can now provide a complete end-to-end picture of all components of an application and their integrated performance versus the straight-line, element-focused approach from before. Because of NimBUS’ easy drag-and-drop templates, we were able to cut down migration time considerably.”
—John Bradbury, Vice President of Managed Services, IntelliNet

With success comes growth—in the number of clients, in the size of the companies served, in the number of devices that must be monitored, in the volume of events processed, and in the number of geographic locations tracked. This kind of growth leads to a core requirement: an enterprise-class monitoring solution that can grow as fast as your business.

With Nimsoft, Managed Service Providers get the monitoring scalability they need to…

  • Serve more clients with existing staff—through a solution that is efficient to set up and maintain, that features customizable reporting, and much more.

  • Serve larger clients—by leveraging Nimsoft’s 20-year heritage of development, and its leading monitoring solutions, which have been proven in some of the largest enterprise data center, Managed Service Provider, and Hosting Provider deployments.

  • Monitor more devices and simultaneous events, with an efficient, high-performance event processing engine that can scale from monitoring 5 to 100,000 servers.

  • Accommodate more concurrent connections with a secure, reliable, and efficient client access model.

With Nimsoft, Managed Service Providers and Hosting Providers can efficiently address large, multiplatform infrastructures, hundreds or even thousands of servers and network devices, multiple concurrent connections, and more—and do so reliably and efficiently.

Differentiate Services

“The Nimsoft solution was quite simply a perfect match. It is rich in functionality, easy to get installed, and competitively priced. Already, our service level reports have yielded tremendous success and customer satisfaction."
—Cedric Brown, Network Operations Director, IBBS

For Managed Service Providers who focus on the SMB market, low-end, Windows-focused monitoring solutions have sufficed for some time. But as the competitive landscape gets increasingly crowded, those Managed Service Providers that offer only basic, platform-specific monitoring services are having an increasingly difficult time gaining distinction from competitors, who typically offer the same services. That’s why, today, having only limited monitoring tools is becoming an increasing liability for those providers looking to gain distinction and increase market share.

With Nimsoft, Managed Service Providers can deliver the sophisticated monitoring and reporting services that yield significant distinction in the market. Only Nimsoft solutions…

  • Provide sophisticated, intuitive reports and dashboards that can be fully customized to your client’s preferences and priorities.

  • Enable you to quickly customize dashboard views so staff can more proactively control operations and so clients can effectively observe your active control over their business applications and IT infrastructure.

  • Help you offer a broader, more impressive array of services, increasing the likelihood that your offerings will meet more of a prospective client’s requirements than your competitors—so you win more business.

  • Offer rich SLA reporting capabilities that feature trending analysis, SLA breach forecasts, and intuitive pinpointing of SLA-endangering issues—enabling your firm to more consistently comply with SLAs and minimize the financial risk of SLA breaches.

With these capabilities, Managed Service Providers can more effectively demonstrate the levels of service being provided, and gain the insights they need to become more educated, strategic advisors to clients.

Speed Service Delivery

"We were excited to see how quickly NimBUS deployed compared to OpenView. In a typical 10 server environment, I'd say we cut our deployment time by 80 percent. Where we used to take days to bring up new customer SLAs, we now do it in hours."
—Vince Conroy, CTO, FusionStorm

In recent years, some Managed Service Providers sought to displace their limited, platform-specific monitoring solutions with products from the “big four”—HP, CA, IBM, and BMC. In some cases these products ultimately delivered the capabilities required, but for many Managed Service Providers, the time to value equation just simply hasn’t added up. Often, it can take weeks to get a new client’s services up and running. If new services or changes are required, staff may need to devote weeks to customization efforts. Big four solutions promise robust monitoring capabilities, but all too often the promise isn’t realized. In fact, today, many Managed Service Providers that are locked into big four solutions are starting to see their market share dwindle because their services simply can’t keep pace with the needs of customers.

Nimsoft offers a real, practical way to put sophisticated monitoring capabilities to work for your organization—faster, easier, and cheaper than any legacy product. With Nimsoft, Managed Service Providers can significantly accelerate the addition of new clients, with set up often happening within hours.

Nimsoft speeds implementation, while offering a robust, nimble architecture that offers…

  • High availability features that ensure client data is protected at all times, providing spooling capabilities that ensure network outages don’t compromise data availability, support for failover in multi-tier environments, and more.

  • Segmentation capabilities that enable secure, efficient partitioning of data for multiple clients within a single unified database and infrastructure.

  • Open APIs and out-of-the-box integration with a range of third party products, making it easy for Managed Service Providers to adapt Nimsoft solutions to any management tools and monitoring processes.

  • A flexible, distributed deployment architecture that accommodates an array of deployment scenarios—including within Managed Service Provider hosting facilities and across geographically distributed client sites—through both agent-based and agentless monitoring.

  • Reliable, secure, and efficient communications across distributed sites—using SSL tunneling to securely connect remote client infrastructures to Managed Service Provider operations and offering an efficient publish-and-subscribe messaging bus.

Deliver Value-added Services

“Most monitoring solutions only infer what the end user is encountering. NimBUS was different. It was affordable and it enabled us to measure and actively monitor what our end users are experiencing.”
—Roy La Croix, executive director, PTSO of Washington.

In just a few years, emerging technologies like virtualization and VoIP have gained pervasive market acceptance. For Managed Service Providers looking to expand penetration within existing accounts, and expand market share through a broader service portfolio, having only rudimentary monitoring capabilities can present a real hindrance.

With Nimsoft, Managed Service Providers can deliver more sophisticated, value-added services that offer more business value—and better margins. Nimsoft enables Managed Service Providers to deliver the core infrastructure monitoring services that they’ve traditionally offered, as well as these premium services:

  • End-to-end application response monitoring. End user response is ultimately the most vital measure of an IT infrastructure’s health: if an end user’s receiving slow or no response, business productivity takes a direct hit. With Nimsoft, Managed Service Providers can offer end user response monitoring that can present significant and immediate bottom-line benefits—and so enjoy a more profitable service offering that improves customer loyalty.

  • Virtualized infrastructure monitoring. With Nimsoft, Managed Service Providers can monitor the entire virtualized ecosystem—including the virtualization components, the resident business applications, and end user response times—to effectively understand and manage service levels in virtualized environments.

  • VoIP monitoring. Managed Service Providers can use Nimsoft products to monitor and manage every service and system within their entire Cisco VoIP (Voice over IP) ecosystem, including VoIP networks, call activity, and messaging.

  • Home grown application monitoring. Nimsoft solutions can be easily tailored to your client’s custom developed applications, which can help deepen account penetration and customer loyalty.

  • Custom monitoring services.  With the Nimsoft’s Software Developer Kit, Managed Service Providers can create solutions that are tailored to their specific target markets and customer requirements, and so bring entirely unique offerings to market.