Nimsoft Promotes Pay As You Go Service Provider Monitoring
How can managed services providers “scale up” or “scale down” their monitoring services, especially as customers scale up and scale down their cloud and virtualized applications? Nimsoft thinks it has an answer to that riddle. It’s called “see as you go–pay as you go” unified monitoring. Here are some details and analysis.
Nimsoft, as you may recall, is owned by CA Technologies. Nimsoft got its start as an on-premises monitoring platform. But in recent months, Nimsoft has expanded to introduce a unified monitoring dashboard, plus a SaaS platform called Nimsoft On Demand.
The latest Nimsoft move involves “real-time usage metering, elastic portlets and unified service dashboards” for Nimsoft’s on-premises and on-demand offerings.
According to Nimsoft:
“Service providers and IT staffs can now automatically create and deliver monitoring data and alerts that expand and contract with cloud and virtualized service delivery, while tracking and archiving usage in real time for auditing and billing purposes.”
The so-called Elastic IT services, Nimsoft says, enables MSPs to “automate the presentation of monitoring dashboards to clients and flexibly bill for their monitoring services.”
Competitive Moves
Is this Nimsoft move truly unique? I concede: I can’t say for sure. On the one hand, many SaaS-based MSP tools offer pay-as-you-go models based on nodes monitored. As node counts go up or down, monthly bills for the tools typically adjust accordingly.
But it sounds like Nimsoft is doing something different here. This elastic IT services strategy sounds like it’s based on workload sizes — as customers consume more or less monitoring services, it sounds like Nimsoft MSPs will be able to dynamically adjust their monthly billing — similar to how electric utilities bill for power.
Again, I need to study up a bit more on Nimsoft’s strategy here, plus I need to see how the effort compares to rival offerings. Quite a few MSPs already have virtualization expertise, but most MSPs are just getting started with cloud computing. It looks like Nimsoft is trying to anticipate MSPs shifting more customers to cloud systems and utility-based billing. I’ll be watching to see how the strategy plays out.
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Joe,
Glad to see the interest in knowing more about our see as you go, pay as you go… You’re right when you suggest we’re doing something different here. Here is some information that may help clarify some of the questions you have–a couple of key thoughts on what’s unique about our approach:
1) Full functioning performance and availability in a SaaS solution that monitors many data points from traditional data center components (AS/400, databases, etc) to virtualization (VMware, Sun, Microsoft, IBM, Citrix) to cloud and SaaS (Salesforce, TriNet, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace) to power – no one else has such breadth of coverage delivered via either a SaaS or on-premise solution.
2) These new capabilities go way beyond node up or down tracking. Yes, others monitor usage but we collect the real-time usage data and present it hourly. Service provider customers can then use our mediation module to format and present the data in the way they charge their customers.
I would be happy to discuss these points and the overall strategy with you at any time, just let us know.
Chris O’Connell, director of product marketing, Nimsoft
LogicMonitor does not explicitly target MSPs (but has quite a few as customers), but has been delivering the above for quite some time.
We deliver real time graphs and alerts on everything in a data center – be it physical (PDUs, server hardware, network gear, storage systems, database, applications, etc) or virtual (all the above plus Xen, ESX, EC2, Eucalyptus, etc, specific monitoring).
Spawn new EC2 instances (or add physical machines, or create new Xen VMs, etc) and LogicMonitor detects it, determines what applications are on it, and provides very detailed monitoring and reporting.
I guess we need to come up with a name for it, though. 🙂