ManageEngine announced the preview of the upcoming major upgrade of OpManager, its data center and network monitoring software.

The next version of OpManager 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.

ManageEngine is demonstrating OpManager, and exhibiting the rest of its portfolio, in booth 1367 at Interop 2013 being held May 6-10, 2013, at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.

The company is also demonstrating major upgrades that were just announced for ADSelfService Plus, the IT self-service software; Applications Manager, the on-premise application monitoring solution; and Site24x7, the cloud infrastructure monitoring service.

"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 Views and Productivity

To establish real-time views of data center and network resources, the new version of OpManager uses reverse AJAX as a push mechanism to send alerts as soon as they are triggered. By automatically pushing alerts from the server to the client and displaying them in the user interface in real time, OpManager will overcome the time delays introduced by collecting alerts via periodic page refreshes.

ManageEngine has also optimized the user interface, enabling keyboard interactivity to support ultra-fast alarm processing - an industry-first for a web-based network management application. Instead of forcing users to click their way through alarms using a mouse, OpManager will let users clear an alarm using the ALT+C combination from a keyboard.

Taken together, OpManager's user interface enhancements can add up to significant savings given the real-time alerts, faster page loading and keyboard shortcuts. For instance, saving an hour a day per IT technician can save tens of thousands of dollars on a five-person IT team.

360-Degree Views of Root Causes

Enterprise IT departments need sophisticated monitoring for each aspect of their operations, from basic infrastructure to bandwidth, applications and change management. However, these sophisticated tools churn out alerts at an alarming rate and volume, making it difficult to manipulate the alerts and find the root cause of the problem.

To put the challenge in perspective, a sample use case reveals the usual root cause exercise. A bad configuration change is made in a firewall at 11am. By 12pm, that change creates a network looping, which triggers a 12:15pm bandwidth spike that affects the performance of a key application at 1pm. Users, in turn, simply report "the application is slow" at 1:15pm, leaving the IT department to recreate the preceding chain of events, working in reverse order with the individual alerts generated by the individual monitors.

OpManager streamlines that process with Network360, a new 360-degree root cause analysis tool that will debut in the next version of OpManager. Network360 tracks all the alerts from ManageEngine's NetFlow, configuration management, and application management plug-ins. It then creates a single, correlated alert based on pre-defined rules and plots the event flow on a time-based, multi-series graph. Ultimately, Network360 makes it easier for users 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. 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.

To reduce the capital expense as well as the operating expense associated with data center and network monitoring, the upcoming version of OpManager will include a highly scalable engine that helps scale up to 5,000 devices or 50,000 interfaces from a single enterprise server.

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

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