Real-time IT management company ManageEngine, a division of ZoHo Corp., debuted key product portfolio enhancements at Oracle OpenWorld 2012. In addition to improvements to its flagship network monitoring software (NMS), OpManager, the company also upgraded its network configuration and change management (NCCM) solution, DeviceExpert, and enterprise password management software, Password Manager Pro.
“One of the things we have been talking about for the last year is the concept of real time, and real time implies immediacy,” Raj Sabhlok, president of ManageEngine, tells 5 Minute Briefing. “Historically, IT has been more of a batch-oriented organization, where you submit a problem and wait for some resolution but as businesses make technology more ingrained in their overall revenue generation and profit generation functions, you just can’t have that. It has got to move with the pace of business, and so a lot of the product announcement and development focus for us has been to deliver more real-time capabilities.”
At Oracle OpenWorld, ManageEngine introduced OpManager’s real-time performance monitoring in beta. OpManager now includes an agent that monitors Windows services, processes and event logs of mission-critical applications such as Exchange, SQL, and IIS, and fault or performance issues raise alarms in OpManager to help identify IT issues as they arise. According to ManageEngine, OpManager is the first enterprise network monitoring product outside of HP, IBM and CA software to offer per-second monitoring. “We actually automate the deployment of the agents, and they are very low-bandwidth-consuming agents. The benefit is that you get real-time response,” says Sabhlok. “OpManager to date has been a software product that doesn’t employ agents - and that worked really well for a lot of our small to medium-size businesses where simplicity was the order of the day.” However, Sbhlok notes, some ManageEngine customers today are managing a 100,000 devices in their network, and technology is so ingrained in the success of their business that they can’t afford any kind of a lag, making the real-time monitoring agents a requirement. Complementing the agents announced at OpenWorld, agents for Linux and Mac will be added later.
In addition, Password Manager Pro adds privileged session recording (beta) enabling sessions launched from Password Manager Pro to now be video recorded, archived and played back to support forensic audits. By monitoring all actions performed by privileged accounts during privileged sessions, enterprises can counter threats to information security that arise from outside as well as inside the corporate firewall. The new feature reinforces the software’s existing internal control capabilities and its ability to secure, manage and monitor activities associated with the lifecycle of privileged passwords, including those of Oracle DB servers, in fully automated fashion. This feature is especially important to public companies that and others that must be able to answer and document the questions of who, what, where and when with regard to their systems and data for compliance purposes, explains Sabhlok, noting, “It is humanly impossible to manage all the passwords for all the devices, applications, and databases without automating that process.”
And finally, new REST APIs announced at OpenWorld enable third-party software to directly integrate with DeviceExpert and add, access and extract data. Moreover, the APIs facilitate DeviceExpert integration with an enterprise Configuration Management Database (CMDB), so users can leverage network monitoring, configuration management, and change control in complete alignment with the enterprise CMDB, keeping it up to date with respect to device configurations in the enterprise and resulting in better management of network assets. Now, configurations are documented in case there is a catastrophic -type outage and it becomes necessary to replace key components in the environment, says Sabhlok. “This capability is about real time - shortening outages and getting back up and running as fast as possible if an outage does occur.” The new functionality is also extended to the OpManager NCCM plug-in, which helps IT teams accelerate fault remediation through workflow-driven network automation.
For more information on ManageEngine, visit www.manageengine.com.