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Klir Technologies on Sept. 25 brought the community collaboration experience of Web 2.0 applications to the task of managing IT infrastructure with its Klir Analytics 3.0 release.
Klir, which provides a SAAS (software as a service) offering for managing the performance and availability of servers and network devices, hopes to bring to SMBs (small and midsize businesses) the benefits of network or systems experts without having to hire them.
Klir Analytics 3.0 in its new user interface employs techniques commonly found in consumer applications such as Google and Wikipedia to deliver a more personalized and intuitive point-and-click experience for monitoring, analyzing and reporting on IT infrastructure elements. Based on AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), it uses tags, user ratings and commenting.
Users can help each other solve specific problems by adding content from industry, trade or vendor sites that is relevant to particular issues affecting servers, network devices and applications.
“Users [in SMBs] dont want to write command-line scripts to get data. We said, Lets abstract all that back-end data from the front end, so that the network engineer can look at the world by IP address and the CEO can look at it by location with logical drill-downs,” said Klir Technologies CEO James Maiocco, in Seattle. “By abstracting that data, now every user can have a completely personalized view of the world as they see fit,” he said.
The Klir service does not provide detailed diagnostics on specific elements such as an Exchange application, but it does provide “broad-brush 80 percent depth and capabilities for IT management,” he said.
By facilitating collaboration among users via shared dashboards, reports and alerts, Klirs service will encourage a Web 2.0 community around IT management, Maiocco said. Users can share best practices and expertise through the interface.
“Network management in particular is more of an art, rather than a science. A good engineer knows the common things that happen and they know where to look when problems occur. For midsized companies that dont have that network guru, this provides a nice knowledge base they can draw on,” said George Hamilton, senior analyst at Yankee Group Research, in Boston. “As it keeps going and gets more information and more fixes that are added to it, itll add more value,” he said.
Klir Analytics 3.0 dashboards, reports and alerts are based on AJAX, so that customers can drag and drop to “group things however you want,” Maiocco said. The dashboards include logical analysis. For example, if an alarm goes off for Lotus Notes, and there are 100 servers associated with that application, the user can click on the alarm and “itll take you to the device that pertains to that alarm,” he said.
Users can publish dashboards to a community, and any tags on reports in the dashboard are available and searchable by anyone in the community.
To encourage more widespread adoption of the service among SMBs, Klir Technologies on Sept. 25 offered Klir Analytics for free for managing up to 25 devices and 100 interfaces. The service, with the new Analytics 3.0 release, which is being beta tested now, can be provisioned from Klirs Web site. Version 3.0 will be generally available in January.