ManageEngine, the company that delivers real-time IT management tools, announced a preview of the upcoming major upgrade of OpManager, its data center and network monitoring software which will feature 360-degree root cause analysis, enterprise-class scalability and a real-time user interface to help large enterprises and service providers ease their private cloud management.

“For IT teams today, life in the data center and on the network requires faster responses and remediation for a growing number of challenges,” said Dev Anand, director of product management at ManageEngine. “Unfortunately, root cause analysis is a backward process in most IT departments while scaling a monitoring solution often imposes high costs in both IT staff and systems. And without real-time views, IT teams can’t act with real-time responsiveness. That’s all going to change with this next version of OpManager.”

Real-Time View and Productivity

The new version of OpManager uses reverse AJAX as a push mechanism to send alerts to establish real-time views of data center and network resources which allows OpManager to overcome time delays.  Aside from that, the user interface has been optimized to enable keyboard interactivity to support ultra-fast alarm processing – an industry-first for a web-based network management application.  Instead of using your mouse to clear an alarm, you can just press ALT+C on your keyboard to clear it.  And page reloading has also been upgraded to load faster thus more tasks can be accomplished.

The upgrades on OpManager can provide significant savings not only in time consumption but tens of thousands of dollars on a five-person IT team.

360-Degree Views of Root Causes

Enterprise IT departments are in need of a sophisticated monitoring system for each aspect of their operations, from basic infrastructure to bandwidth, applications and change management without the hassle of dealing with tons of alerts brought about by using sophisticated tools.  The fast-paced roll out of alerts make it difficult for IT to manipulate the alert and find the root cause of the problem.

And this is what ManageEngine aims to address in the next version of OpManager which will come with Network360, a new 360-degree root cause analysis tool.  Network360 tracks all the alerts from ManageEngine’s NetFlow, configuration management, and application management plug-ins, then creates a single, correlated alert based on pre-defined rules and plots the event flow on a time-based, multi-series graph.  Network360 make sit easier to see causal relationships needed to perform the root cause analysis.

Enterprise-Class Scalability

Scalability is always a concern for large enterprises and service providers as their IT resources proliferate at a faster pace.  But scalability comes with a price, and it’s not cheap.  As the management footprint grows, so do the hardware costs for servers as well as the staffing, cooling and power costs for server patches and maintenance. For example, an average server costs $3,500 to acquire and another $200 per month to operate. Those figures double to $7,000 and $400 per month, respectively, in organizations that have failover systems in place to support high availability.

OpManager addresses the issue of scalability as it includes a highly scalable engine that helps scale up to 5,000 devices or 50,000 interfaces from a single enterprise server.  With that, operating expenses associated with data center and network monitoring is reduced.

Pricing and Availability

Network360 and the real-time UI are available in beta for OpManager 10 Essential Edition and Enterprise Edition while the enterprise-scale engine is available in beta for OpManager 10 Enterprise Edition which OpManager customers can try out via the beta program.  OpManager Enterprise Edition prices start at $16,495 for 500 devices and can be downloaded here.

If you want to find out more about the OpManager upgrade, you can drop by at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, booth 1367 at Interop 2013 from May 6-10, 2013.  ManageEngine is also demonstrating major upgrades announced for ADSelfService Plus, the IT self-service software; Applications Manager, the on-premise application monitoring solution; and Site24x7, the cloud infrastructure monitoring service.