Netuitive Performance Tool Targets Enterprises

Netuitive's SI tool is designed to accurately discover performance problems in enterprise IT systems.

Business service management provider Netuitive on Sept. 10 will take its brand of end-to-end performance management to large enterprises when it launches the latest release of its Netuitive SI tool.

In the latest release, Netuitive addresses the scalability as well as role-based access requirements of larger IT shops in its Netuitive SI 4, which is a self-learning tool that observes the typical behavior of systems to determine when real performance abnormalities appear.

The alternative in many traditional performance management products, especially those from CA, IBM/Tivoli, Hewlett-Packard and BMC Software, is to require users to manually set thresholds, create rules and write scripts to catch performance problems.

Such tools typically generate too much data; deliver very little meaningful information; and they initiate too many false alerts, according to Jean Francois Huard, chief technology officer and vice president of Research and Development for Netuitive, in Reston, Va.

"Netuitive SI self-learns the behavior of the key performance indicators of each system for databases, Web servers, network devices, SAN storage, applications and so on. It creates a behavior profile [of those] and gives a baseline based on time of day and day of week for each [Key Performance Indicator] for what the value is at that time of day/day of week," he said.

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Read more here about Netuitives performance management technology.

The tool also self-learns KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) in the context of other interdependent functions, such as how memory utilization is related to workload. Netuitive SI gathers metrics generated by customers existing monitoring tools using adapters created for the major monitoring products, such as BMCs Performance Manager and Patrol, NetIQs AppManager, Tivoli Enterprise Console, Microsoft Operations Manager and more.

One Netuitive customer using BMC performance monitoring software found that before adding Netuitive SI, the volume of Patrol alerts was so high, they were "unusable," said the customer, who asked not to be identified.

"We got into a game of trying to set and reset static thresholds, which were always either too high or too low. Then we finally said, Turn those darn things off. Netuitive very quickly learned what was normal [for different times of day], and very quickly learned behavior that was not normal, allowing us to prevent an outage that wed had before," added the customer.

Using an advanced mathematical engine, it performs regression analysis and automated statistical analysis to profile behavior on different servers, and generates trusted alarms when a true abnormality occurs, Huard said.

In Netuitive SI 4, the company scaled the tool to be able to correlate millions of data points from tens of thousands of servers every few minutes—without requiring a mainframe to process the data points. And it works across a range of servers and applications. Previous releases processed performance metrics for thousands of servers every 50 minutes, Huard said.

At the same time, Netuitive enhanced the user interface to enable hierarchical visualization and smart groups to make the management of tens of thousands of systems across the enterprise more intuitive.

New role-based access control and integration with LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) also open usage of the tool to more types of users, without adding an administrative burden or creating security vulnerabilities. And personalized dashboards can be tailored to the types of users working with the tool.

"It works across different types of users, on multiple platforms. The business owner, business manager, systems administrator and systems engineer can use it. Not just the operations guy," said Huard.

The Netuitive customer, who has seen the beta version of SI 4 in action, hopes to use the LDAP support and "fine-grained, role-based assignment" to give access to the tool for users outside of IT operations while still maintaining normal access controls. "I want to take advantage of that to say, This category of user gets this type of access and not have to be entering each one of those users in. That way I dont have to manage it," he said.

The plan at that organization is to allow application groups who are responsible for "keeping a business service running" to take advantage of Netuitive SIs reporting to do their jobs more effectively.

"When they are making some decisions on capacity, they can look at what the normal band is based on time of day and day of week, and they may see they wont have to add a lot of capacity," he said.

Netuitive SI 4, which competes with business service management tools from Managed Objects and ProactiveNet, will be generally available Sept. 10.

Editors Note: This story was updated to correct Jean Francois Huards title.

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