Nimsoft White Paper Downloads

ITIL—A Formula for Successful IT Service Management

A growing number of IT organizations are investigating the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) to assess how it can help improve their ability to reliably and cost-effectively deliver key business applications to end-users. This white paper is designed to provide background and insight into ITIL as well as describing a practical approach to implementing ITIL.

In addition to a general overview of ITIL, this white paper provides information describing some of the critical considerations that need to be incorporated when planning for adoption of the ITIL framework. Unlike other ITIL documents, we describe an approach for determining where to get started with ITIL and steps for building an implementation roadmap.

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Enterprise Management for SOAs and Web Services

The promise of an SOA is that it enables a business to respond faster and more cost-effectively to changing market conditions than ever before. That, combined with the ability to put IT in lock-step with business and corporate objectives, is what’s fueling the widespread adoption of service-oriented architectures around the world today. The market research and consulting firm Gartner recently projected that at least 65 percent of large enterprises will build more than 35 percent of their applications within SOA environments by 2010.

Web services are similarly seeing high adoption rates, not only because they have the ability to create discrete value, they also serve an important role in the implementation of SOAs. However, just as with any new enterprise technologies or architectures, additional considerations and complexities come into play as companies adopt them. Effective management of SOAs and Web services is certainly no exception.

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IT Service Modeling

Nimsoft has taken a top-down, model-based approach to IT service management (ITSM) that provides benefits that are all but impossible to achieve with conventional network system or enterprise system management (NSM/ESM) tools. It's not an easy shift to make from a bottom-up to top-down approach to service management, however. IT operations personnel can benefit from some practical guidance on how to enable and implement a service-oriented approach to IT operations management.

As one of the few vendors to provide large, complex IT organizations with top-down service management software—and with it, the means to rapidly and dramatically improve their service delivery capabilities—Nimsoft has a solid understanding of the considerations and necessities of successfully implementing a service model approach.

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Nimsoft Indicative Presentation Views

Indicative Software products proactively manage complex distributed IT environments by providing in-context visualization and control of the entire service value chain. With a cohesive architecture, Indicative’s offerings are quick to implement and demonstrate value within just days. Leveraging a single point of administration, Indicative gives both IT organizations and lines of business cost effective presentation options for viewing realtime service performance data. This paper discusses how Indicative deliver service-level management information and the choices users have in viewing management data.

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Time to Value: End-to-end Monitoring in a Few Quick and Simple Steps

Vendors of conventional IT management toolsets expect your staff to invest significant time configuring your system with information on the IT services and components you want to monitor. As your environment changes, continuous effort is required to reconfigure the system. Additionally, these conventional tools often focus on a narrow slice of your technology infrastructure.

So if you want to monitor servers, network elements and software components for a specific application, you will likely need separate management products and consoles for each. And that means your staff spends a lot of time looking at different monitors and interpreting volumes of raw management data.

This paper will show you how it’s possible to get up and running quickly with a visual monitoring capability for your own environment. The following sections take you through these steps using the capabilities of Nimsoft.

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Effective Data Collection for Enterprise Monitoring

At the heart of every approach to enterprise management is the need to monitor the IT environment for what is working and what isn’t. Today’s sophisticated monitoring approaches provide data to help IT operations determine whether a component-level problem is impacting key business services and applications.

The most effective products efficiently collect performance data without a lot of setup and overhead, to provide a clear picture of the impact a problem is having (or could have) on a network or the entire enterprise. Data collection mechanisms used by enterprise management products for monitoring are categorized as either agent-based or agentless.

This white paper looks at the pros and cons of agent and agentless approaches, and describes a unique approach from Nimsoft, which combines the best of both techniques while limiting the liabilities associated with each.

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Capacity Management in Virtual Infrastructures

VMware's virtualization capabilities have been deployed in an array of organizations around the world, and for good reason: they have helped many organizations significantly optimize the performance of their infrastructure.

Yet for all the benefits virtualization delivers, its also present a range of challenges—most critically when it comes to doing effective capacity management. This white paper offers a detailed look at the challenges of capacity management in virtualized infrastructures, and it offers a wealth of practical insights into addressing these challenges and setting the stage for successful VMware deployments.

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NimBUS for VMware Monitoring

While VMware’s virtualization capabilities ushered in a world of potential benefits, they also brought an entirely new world of challenges from a monitoring perspective - challenges that legacy system management tools and point solutions are ill-equipped to address. This white paper offers an overview of the unique challenges of monitoring service levels of business applications in a virtualized environment, and it reveals how NimBUS products from Nimsoft uniquely addresses these challenges.

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Best Practices for Optimizing Performance and Availability in Virtual Infrastructures

Many IT administrators have already learned the hard way that managing the performance and availability of services built on virtualization technologies can be difficult, if not impossible at times. All too often, early adopters of virtualization have struggled with limited technology features and stability constraints, while learning new ways to effectively manage capacity requirements.

Fortunately, some platforms now offer clustering solutions that are mature enough to automate the balancing of workloads across physical resources. When combined with disciplined capacity planning and sound deployment configurations, it is possible to achieve fast, scalable, and highly available IT services using virtualization platforms.

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NimBUS for Network Monitoring

The NimBUS for Network Monitoring solution verifies network connectivity to devices and application services revealing accessibility and network latency. The solution auto-discovers network interfaces, monitors interface traffic and calculates bandwidth utilization.

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NimBUS for Server Monitoring

The NimBUS for Server Monitoring solution supports iSeries AS400, Netware, Linux, Windows, and UNIX from a single, easy-to-use console. The solution monitors core server resources (CPU, memory, disk, event logs, counters, etc.) and enables centralized management of remote processes and services (automated and manual start/restart/stop).

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The Top 5 Server Monitoring Battles—and How You Can Win Them

The role of servers in your organization has changed substantially—with their uses, requirements, and complexity all increasing dramatically in recent years. Many of the traditional tools and techniques that worked in the past don't suffice any more. Consequently, server monitoring presents several critical battles in today's demanding environments.

This guide looks at some of the most pressing challenges administrators face in ensuring optimal server performance, and it offers insights into the tools and strategies required to address these demands.

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NimBUS for iSeries AS400 Monitoring

The solution automatically monitors iSeries AS400 message queues and log files, jobs, directory and file integrity, plus monitoring for a myriad of system statistics such as processing unit, storage, users and more. All iSeries AS400 status data is analyzed and displayed in graphical alarm dashboards, performance reports, and SLA compliance reports.

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NimBUS for Database Monitoring

The NimBUS for Database Monitoring solution monitors a wide array of availability and performance metrics for database servers. Additionally, the solution monitors SQL query response times and transaction rates. The solution supports multiple database platforms: Oracle, Sybase, DB2, MS SQL, and Informix.

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NimBUS for Cisco VoIP

The NimBUS for Cisco VoIP (Voice over IP) solution monitors Cisco VoIP services and underlying infrastructure components in accordance with end-user's service level agreements. Components monitored include Cisco CallManager, Cisco Gateways and Gatekeepers, Cisco IP and ATA Phones, Cisco Routers and Switches, servers, firewalls, and more.

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NimBUS for Digital Healthcare

Today healthcare organizations face many challenges, including rising costs, a high number of preventable medical errors, and productivity losses due to inefficiencies and waste. Urgent industry initiatives to increase healthcare competitiveness and provide better patient care have driven healthcare organizations to integrate and rely upon technology for virtually all aspects of delivering patient healthcare.

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NimBUS Probes and Gateways Overview

NimBUS Probes poll IT infrastructure data points at user-defined intervals for realtime availability and performance trend monitoring. NimBUS Probes are easily configured to archive its poll data to the backend NimBUS database. Once archived probe data can be displayed in NimBUS Dashboards and QoS performance reports. Probe data can also be processed against NimBUS SLAs for compliance reporting.

Nimbus Gateways provide uni- and/or bi-directional integration into 3rd party data sources. Where NimBUS Probes collect data directly from the data source, NimBUS Gateways in most instances collect data from incumbent 3rd party data collectors and consolidation points. NimBUS Gateways are also used to feed NimBUS data into business and 3rd party monitoring databases.

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Get the Whole Picture: Why Most Organizations Miss User Response Monitoring-and What to Do about It

End user response. To borrow a phrase, it's where the rubber meets the road. You can be armed with vast amounts of performance metrics, but if you don't know what users are actually experiencing, you don't have the real performance picture. While this measure is critical, it is one many organizations fail to consistently capture.

Why? This guide looks at the challenges of user response monitoring, and it shows how you can overcome these challenges and start to get a real handle on your infrastructure performance and how it impacts your users' experience.

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NimBUS for End to End (ETE) Response Time Monitoring

The solution monitors end-to-end (ETE) application response times from an end-users perspective. Additionally, the solution monitors response times for directory services, web services, email services, database services and network services. Response time data is analyzed and displayed in graphical alarm consoles, performance reports and SLA reports.

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End-user Experience Monitoring

According to Forrester Research, “end-user experience has to be the benchmark for enterprise application performance*,” which of course makes perfect sense, given that enterprises are spending billions of dollars to enable productivity and automation gains as specifically directed by end-users.

These processes are critical to the bottom line operation of a business and in most cases end-user performance degradation can be directly correlated to a negative business impact.

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Nimsoft Indicative Real User Monitoring

Indicative Real User Monitoring (RUM) is for organizations moving from reactive to proactive management. Indicative RUM is the only solution that leverages a single architecture capable of monitoring the entire service delivery chain. Furthermore, any and all data collection can be leveraged by Indicative's field-proven, functionalityrich product. Indicative makes quick deployments possible as it delivers valuable context to speed troubleshooting and low administration efforts for an IT organization already occupied with the workload of managing their complex business services.

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3 Common Pitfalls to SLM - and How to Avoid Them

It seems that for every successful service level management (SLM) initiative, there are several that fail to meet expectations. For all the complexity surrounding SLM, there are three critical facets that underpin every effective SLM implementation.

This guide looks at these key facets, outlining the common pitfalls that occur when these aspects are missed, and it offers a wealth of pragmatic guidance for avoiding these pitfalls and ensuring SLM meets objectives and delivers real business value.

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Service Level Management: On the Level

IT departments are apprehensive about service level management (SLM). Fair enough. The reality is most software vendors offer only highly expensive approaches that bombard you with complexity and fail to deliver immediate value. So how does IT help the enterprise accelerate business performance? What tools do you need to control the infrastructure? Is there an easy, practical approach for guaranteeing application service levels?  Get the answers here.

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NimBUS for SLA Monitoring and Reporting

The NimBUS for SLA Monitoring and Reporting solution monitors Operations and business service levels against SLA metrics and forecasts violations with warning alerts. The solution provides a graphical interface for defining SLA parameters, i.e. compliance period, operating period, exclude periods, compliance percentage, compliance calculation methods, and much more.

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NimBUS Executive and Business Dashboards

NimBUS Dashboards provide users (Executives, Operations, etc.) with tailored views that show the realtime status of IT and critical business services. NimBUS Dashboards are flexible to enable users to see practically any type of data in a single view (i.e. Help Desk call statistics, application performance metrics, IT resource utilization, and much more). Dashboards are web-enabled for remote accessibility and have access control features to ensure NimBUS Dashboards are in the hands of the right users.

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Nimsoft Indicative IT Service Delivery Management

Indicative's all-in-one product proactively manages distributed IT environments with context, visualization and control of the entire service value chain. It is quick to implement and demonstrates results within days. Indicative's cohesive architecture enables IT to evolve from event-based technology management to application performance and business service management.

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Establishing SLAs that are Meaningful for Customers and Achievable by IT

Service level agreements (SLAs) are contracts for the delivery of a specified level of service. The contract is typically between the enterprise IT department as the provider of the service, and the line of business organization as the customer. SLAs are also used between IT departments and external customers, or even between external service providers with enterprise IT as the customer.

In all cases, SLAs connect IT more directly to the service requirements of businesses or customers. As this happens, delivering the necessary service level becomes more material to business results. IT departments have justified their investment to develop robust SLAs in terms of an increase in operational efficiency, increased customer satisfaction and even increased business opportunity due to identifying competitive advantages.

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Universal Best Practices for Managed Services 

The managed services profession is as complex as it is diverse and continues to change to meet the needs of its many clients throughout the world. Yet, with all these changes facing the managed services industry there have been a core group of principles that have successfully guided MSPs throughout the years. These "best practices" are simply philosophies that successful MSPs have used; in fact, most of these practices are considered to be fundamental to running a successful business in many other industries.

These best practices can be employed by MSPs of all shapes, sizes, and vertical markets. In addition to being good business principles, these best practices will allow MSPs to become highly profitable, efficient, and scalable.

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NimBUS for Managed Service Providers

For MSPs, the NimBUS Service Level Management solution strikes a unique balance between ease of use, rapid client deployment, and monitoring sophistication.

Upon review of the NimBUS product, it will become immediately clear that the solution was designed and written from the ground up with Service Level Management in mind. Its lean, modular architecture, with security flexibility to accommodate a variety of network configurations, lends itself well to the MSP business model.

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Service Level Management: Reaching the Pinnacle of Managed Services
Authored by the MSPAlliance and Nimsoft

The Managed IT Services industry has now reached a level of respectability and validity around the world. Managed services are literally everywhere, offering organizations a new way to deal with their IT investments.

Companies engaged in the IT management industry are quickly finding that reacting to problems is no longer acceptable. The new model for IT management is to prevent as many problems from occurring as possible. This is the essence of the managed services business model. As more and more companies embrace and take advantage of the numerous benefits afforded by turning to a managed services provider (MSP), the more advanced MSPs are fast realizing the need for delivering high margin service level monitoring and management to their clients.

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An Insider's Guide to Outsourcing
Authored by Berbee

For most companies, outsourcing has been a key business strategy for some time. Whether you realize it or not, some or all of the above function are being outsources by your company. So, the issue is not whether to outsource or not, it is to determine which functions you wish to keep in-house for strategic and other reasons and which are potential candidates for outsourcing.

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