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RiverMuse PRO provides the facility to consolidate your Data Center Operations in a single pane of glass, and achieve Operational Excellence by automating tasks and streamlining processes.
RiverMuse Core, the first enterprise-class open source Real-time Consolidated Operations Console system ideally collects information via SNMP traps and Syslog messages out-of-the-box. Additionally it supports 8 standards-based APIs to obtain data from virtually any source (gSOAP, Perl, Java, C++, XML, PHP, Python, and Ruby on Rails). RiverMuse PRO builds on top of RiverMuse Core and provides a presence management discovery engine, a powerful enterprise desktop console, dynamic alert enrichment from external systems, enhanced scalability, and additional functionalities to streamline organizational processes and dramatically simplify system maintenance.
Perhaps the most compelling reason for pursuing a Consolidated Operations Console solution is being buried in a myriad of tools. And more importantly having little or no business context mapped to the results. The need for a so-called Manager-of-Managers MOM solution becomes more evident the more complex and dynamic an infrastructure becomes – thus requiring various tools to manage and monitor the environment. While multiple monitoring tools are great for specific tasks such as application monitoring, transaction monitoring, or communication device monitoring, problems that affect more than one silo take longer to identify and isolate.
RiverMuse PRO solves this problem by centralizing data across all the different tools, and retrieving events directly from devices when needed. To perform this, RiverMuse PRO includes passive as well as active collectors such as the RiverMuse VMWare agent. This active collector natively interprets CIM (Common Information Model) formatted data streams. Events from different environments are consolidated in one repository, where cross-domain correlation can occur. This allows operations personnel to quickly identify the problem and associated symptoms.
RiverMuse PRO incorporates the event processing scalability of leading commercial Manager-of-Manager solutions without sacrificing granularily.
In other words, all events related to a specific alert are kept in our system and made available on demand including through a launch in context tool. Additionally, correlation can occur against events and alerts. Other leading Manager of Managers tools are also resource intensive and require several install instances to provide value. In contrast, RiverMuse PRO was incorporates a small footprint to curb the overhead and maintenance requirements of legacy MOM solutions without sacrificing elegance and functionality.
In our new White Paper we discuss the IT Operations Management challenges for mid-size Enterprises and MSP’s. In many ways their environment is starting to look like that of the larger enterprise – only scaled down in size. They have also moved to any-to-any IP networks, VoiP phone systems, Virtualized datacenters and SOA based application architectures just like their larger counterparts. In fact the gap in requirements for operations management tools required by mid-size businesses and larger ones is rapidly closing.
Over the last few years, the heightened pace of innovation in service delivery technologies has increased the complexity of IT Operations Management for organizations of all sizes. This problem is particularly acute for Small and Medium Enterprises (SME’s) including regional managed service providers – which have traditionally operated with a lean staff and simpler but silo-based management systems. As long as the technologies they managed were relatively isolated and did not change rapidly, this management and monitoring structure worked fine. However, with the rapid advent of new technologies and the increasing pressure to do more with less – the very fabric of enterprise services has undergone a sea change.
Over the past five years we have witnessed an acceleration of open source software (OSS) adoption by both service provider and enterprises alike. As Gartner stated in a November 2008 report, the primary advantages for customers adopting OSS tools were lower cost of ownership, ease of implementation, investment protection against a single vendor and faster time to market.
These key advantages have held true for the open source industry time and again, enabling it to gain significant market share across the entire IT stack, from operating system to middleware to tools to business applications and across enterprises and service providers (see the discussion on this subject on the microSperience blog). In fact, in the Network and System Management (NSM) space, there is already a wide selection of open source monitoring tools that have gained a broad following.
This is our January RiverMuse poll. The poll results archive will be stored within the RiverMuse Community pages.
We are delighted that NetworkWorld have named RiverMuse as one of their top 10 IT management start up’s to watch in their annual review announced today.
You can read the full article here.
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A recent ComputerWorld article entitled “Big IT is Back, Say HP, IBM, Oracle, EMC, Cisco” discusses the recent formation of the Acadia joint venture between Cisco Systems, EMC and VMware to provide a complete virtual computing environment for enterprises. This alliance pits itself against similar initiatives from HP, IBM and Oracle aiming to offer a complete virtualized infrastructure stack to enterprises. The central argument is that a single-source integrated stack increases productivity in IT operations, strips cost down and offers a higher level of agility. We at RiverMuse agree that a dynamic IT infrastructure based on a strong virtualization fabric is the path forward for IT. Clearly the mega vendors listed above along with Microsoft are best positioned to sway enterprises over for adoption and that’s a good thing.
However when it comes to managing such abstracted and complex fabric their management platforms fall short and the additional vendors in the space including CA, BMC and Compuware seem severely challenged as well due to a lack of genuine innovation. The systematic recourse of all the large vendors for years, even decades has been an acquisition strategy whereby they absorb products, knowledge and engineering talent and swiftly shift their focus from innovation to integration, touting “synergies” as the new panacea.
As the world of IT embraces more advanced computing and networking environments there is a parallel requirement put onto the management platform to harness them effectively and efficiently. Event and fault management, which is at the very core of any infrastructure and service delivery management offering has fallen prey to this rash of acquisition/integration and witnessed little innovation for a decade. Legacy fault management tools from IBM, CA, HP and EMC are no longer adequate as they were built for a more static world, with a low rate of change, no virtuaiization and a single focus on networks and network elements rather than on a broader computing infrastructure and the IT service delivery chain. Fault management is out, event management is in as it captures, processes and renders all signals coming from the infrastructure whether be network, compute, middleware, service or security-related.
Hence RiverMuse was born out of necessity to address the event and fault management challenges of a dynamic IT infrastructure that mega vendors have so long ignored. Genuine innovation is back and it’s not just technical. See for yourself.
JL Valente