A recent IDG survey referenced in a Marketpulse whitepaper underscored the waning loyalty of a majority of users with their legacy log management solution. This was primarily stemming from a need for simplified management, real-time threat response, and reduced costs,  combined with an overwhelming requirement for integrating log management and security information and event management.

There is a parallel that can certainly be drawn here with the state of the NSM world, fractured but still dominated by a few legacy platforms designed in the 80s. This is particularly true of the IT operations management tools / Managers of Managers in the event correlation and analysis space where the top 5 vendors IBM, HP, EMC, BMC and CA provide a suite of complex products that require significant effort and several bolt-on components to deliver on their promises. This is perhaps fine in the large enterprise and service provider domain but not in the mid market where time to value is critical and simplicity paramount.

With the advent of agile and cost-effective network management suites like SolarWinds Orion and system management solutions from Nagios, Microsoft SCOM and NetIQ the mid market is favorably responding and fast adopting new products to solve their infrastructure management problems. In the process new challenges are being introduced to now cope with  a higher level of events and alarms generated by these tools, often poorly de-duplicated, with loads of false positives and clearly not consolidated and correlated across different domains.

 For instance our customers’ infrastructure already generate hundreds of thousands to millions of events and log messages per day that need to be processed, consolidated, and enriched to produce a few hundreds to a few thousand alarms that can be acted upon. Because we operate agnostically with other NSM tools and have the ability to add a consolidation layer that brings together entire infrastructure and application issues into one screen – we are able to simplify management and lower costs dramatically. This also puts us in a position to deliver a true service assurance solution for the mid market that helps manage IT at the service level and not just the device, in real-time through a simplified management interface and at reduced cost. 

It is our belief that what the IDG report captures in relation to the log management market is already happening in the IT operations management market too. Would you agree?

I remember many years ago, working for a large American bank when they went through an exercise to change their IP address ranges throughout Europe. Despite the best efforts of the project team, the task was an absolute nightmare. Not so much the actual address changes throughout every European site – that went fairly smoothly – but the sheer man-effort required around the clock to re-configure the many element management systems scattered across the campus. It took almost a week to re-configure everything, and for almost three weeks after that, we were still mopping up mistakes, mis-configurations and syntax errors. Before these errors were rectified, we (the group that I was part of) missed network faults and missed SLAs, and we were suffering from silent failure (not that I knew what that was back then). The department’s name was mud; it took months of effort to restore confidence in the network management team, and we created a function whose sole purpose was to maintain configuration files throughout the company. I just remember thinking that there must be an easier way to do this.

Several years later, working for a European systems integrator, I designed and built a remote network management system. Key to the success of this system was its ability to monitor change; I was very aware of the pain of that experience with the American bank, and I designed this new system to reduce this kind of pain. But, every time a new customer was added, there were still many weeks of frenetic activity before a service could be commissioned. Despite my best efforts, I was still slave to the sheer number of configuration files that required updating every time a network was added, or something changed in a given network. I could automate the heck out of many parts of the system, but there were still situations where manual intervention was required, and these were always the most contentious times.

If I were tasked with doing the same thing again, my criteria when choosing the right tools would be massively different; I would be looking for a system that used a single language throughout, required minimal intervention to get up and running, and one that would let me re-use configuration files time and time again. This last part would allow me to deliver similar services to multiple customers. People who have worked with me in the past will remember me banging on about “light, generic and elegant” systems.

I’ve finally found one.

RiverMuse has developed the concept of Transportable Business Logic (TBL). This, in essence, is a method of configuring how the various components of the Pro product respond to Alerts from any system or device. Written using a simple yet eloquent meta-language called RiverMuse Object Definition Language (or RODL for short), TBL is object oriented in approach, and is completely device-agnostic. So, if a host changes name or IP address, RiverMuse Pro simply adapts to the change (without the risk of silent failure – see above) and the business logic remains intact.

And, because of the structured nature of TBL, I can take any object file and load it on any number of RiverMuse implementations, and it will always work — truly transportable. If I were a reseller of RiverMuse and other related products, my value proposition would be to reduce the time to value through the RMOs I had written around integrations between these products.

The possibilities are endless; what if I could create RMOs and post them in an Apps Store of some description? And what if I could buy and download RMOs for specific functions created by other RiverMuse users? At the end of the day, experience is best shared, so why should I have to re-invent the wheel every time I come across a new (to me) piece of equipment, system, application or condition? The chances are that somebody out there has already been through that experience, so I could benefit from their knowledge. Light, generic and elegant.

Try for yourself. Download RiverMuse Pro free for 30 days and check out Transportable Business Logic.

Mountain View, CA – June 1, 2010 – RiverMuse has been selected by the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs (SVASE) as one of the 30 finalist companies invited to launch their companies and new products at Launch: Silicon Valley 2010. The event, which will be held June 8, 2010 at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View, is Silicon Valley’s most affordable, high visibility platform for emerging technology companies to springboard their products or services into the market and network with some of Silicon Valley’s most influential executives. Launch: Silicon Valley 2010 will feature new companies that have a product or service available as of June 8, 2010, but have not been in the marketplace for more than a few months beforehand.

This year’s presenters were selected from almost 400 applicants and span the categories of information technology, mobility, security, digital media, next generation internet, technology and clean energy.

RiverMuse earned its place among the finalists for delivering innovation in IT Operations Management with RiverMuse Pro.2.0, its new commercial offering that enables mid-market service providers and enterprises to assure delivery of dynamic IT services through advanced event capture, correlation and alerting. RiverMuse Pro consolidates IT events from all infrastructure components and monitoring tools into one centralized console for rapid problem detection and isolation, and assists in streamlining incident and problem management.

“We are excited to have been selected from among many other emerging and innovative companies by the SVASE team,” said JL Valente, CEO of RiverMuse. “RiverMuse is bringing disruptive new technology in event consolidation and correlation to an underserved segment – mid-market service providers and enterprises. With the pervasive spread of technologies like virtualization, cloud and dynamic infrastructure, these companies are facing the same challenges as larger organizations but without the right set of simple, affordable and yet powerful tools that can help them deliver better IT services at lower operational cost. RiverMuse Pro 2.0, launched last month is well poised to fulfill that need.”

The 30 selected companies will present on stage for 6-minutes plus 4 minutes Q &A with the audience and a panel of VCs and Angels, with the opportunity to explain their products in more detail to the audience in networking breaks. The event will also feature an award for the “Most Likely to Succeed” in each of the six presenting categories. Presenters will be on hand to showcase their companies and products between presentations.

About RiverMuse

Established in 2008, RiverMuse delivers next-generation real-time IT operations management software that uniquely enables service providers and enterprises to maintain the health of their increasingly complex and adaptive environments so they can optimize service levels, drive down costs and respond more nimbly to the changing needs of the business. The company was founded by the serial entrepreneurs who launched Micromuse and RiverSoft, which assure a majority of all public and private internet infrastructures in use today. For more information on RiverMuse please visit www.rivermuse.com.

PR contact :

Julie Bohannon
Julie@rivermuse.com
Ph: +1 415-577-4274

Solarwinds is a great network polling solution, and offers some event collection capabilities. However, googling ‘Solarwinds event correlation’ reveals the product’s shortcomings in the correlation and problem isolation space.

For example, many problems can occur in the IT environment of a business:

• Silent failures: many issues can go unnoticed such as link flapping, spanning tree changes, etc.
• High level of event noise, requiring time and resources to diagnose.
• No conciliation of collected events with performance degradation, and
• No correlation against application performance problems reported by 3rd party tools such as Microsoft SCOM, Hyperic, and CA Wily – essentially no cross-tool correlation.

RiverMuse Pro, our commercial IT operations management solution, accepts any event from any source. That includes Solarwinds Network Performance Manager, Syslog and SNMP traps from network devices, and alarms from other systems and application management tools. RiverMuse Pro addresses the correlation gap in Solarwinds.

A customer of mine recently experienced the scenario of a critical network link flapping. The problem went undetected for 60 minutes. Solarwinds was polling the interfaces every 5 minutes, and pinging for availability every 2 minutes. Coincidentally, the interface happened to be up during each poll. Syslog messages from the devices were noisy, but link down and link up traps were reported. However, given the volume of messages they went unnoticed. Without a real-time operations tool in place, it was not evident that the interface was down or flapping. On the 15-minute mark poll, Solarwinds reported heavy interface errors and packet discards. But the fault was cleared on the subsequent 20-minute mark poll. At the 60 minute mark, the link was down again, which coincided with the Solarwinds poll. It was only then that some smart operators manually sifted through Syslog messages, and determined that the link was flapping.

In contrast, RiverMuse offers a throttle based correlation that can detect link flaps. If 2 or more link down events are reported for the same interface in 3 minutes, RiverMuse can escalate the issue, and generate a summary event indicating the link flap. In addition to that, RiverMuse can perform event priority based correlation. Solarwinds events reporting high packet discards and errors would be correlated as symptoms of the ‘Link flapping’ event.

Lastly, RiverMuse can provide business context and automation on the ‘Link Flapping’ event. A dynamic lookup from an inventory management system would identify the carrier and circuit id. A second lookup from a change management system can provide the escalation contact name and email address. All this information can be viewable in the alert within the RiverMuse console. The escalation contact would also be automatically emailed.

With RiverMuse, a problem that went unnoticed could be detected in real-time. And previously manual procedures would also be automated. Both would safeguard business operation and save time and effort of the operations staff.

Download RiverMuse Pro  free for 30 days and check it out. And if there are additional types of correlations that you would like to set up in your environment, let us know. It would be great to discuss that in our RiverMuse Pro Community.

Read the Press Announcements on the release of RiverMuse Pro v2.0 – the new commercial offering from RiverMuse.

Press Release, May 12, 2010 – RiverMuse Announces New Commercial Product

Press Release, May 12, 2010 – RiverMuse Innovates in IT Operations Management

Also read the blog from JL Valente, CEO of RiverMuse commenting on the launch.

RIVERMUSE RAISES THE INNOVATION BAR IN REAL TIME IT OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT

Disruptive technology delivers on a number of innovations in the IT Event and Fault Management Solutions Category

May 12^th, Redwood City, CA: RiverMuse Inc, the next generation provider of Real-Time IT Operations Management software today announced the availability of RiverMuse Pro v2.0, in a separate release entitled “RiverMuse Levels Playing Field in Service Assurance Market with New Commercial Offering”. Developed by a formidable team that had previously founded industry stalwarts Micromuse and Riversoft, RiverMuse Pro delivers a number of unique capabilities that differentiate it from legacy event and fault management systems.

“With a next generation architecture that is simplified, flexible and automated, RiverMuse Pro ensures that mid-market customers can address the complexities of modern, dynamic service infrastructures easily and effectively”, said  Fred Mutavdzic, CTO of RiverMuse. “We are redefining the basic tenets of event and fault management systems in terms of how contextual data is acquired, processed and kept in sync with changes in the infrastructure without manual intervention, while retaining scalability and granularity through the process. There is no other way to deal with the velocity of change in today’s IT systems than automating the corresponding management functions.”

Highlights of RiverMuse Pro’s disruptive capabilities are as follows:

Automation and Simplicity

RiverMuse Pro features a unique component for the rapid definition, reuse, and dynamic execution of RiverMuse configurations in a single transportable package – called the Transportable Business Logic (TBL). Each package can contain a combination of alert rules, correlation rules, business context definition, a set of actions, and auto-provisioning of an active RiverMuse collector – all centrally managed in an object-based model.

This dramatically reduces system complexity and virtually eliminates the manual intervention required by legacy solutions on every infrastructure change. In addition, an on-demand fingerprinting capability allows the RiverMuse system to automatically identify unknown entities for which events are received, enrich them with complementary information, and invoke the right configuration package.

Federated Integration and Compliance Support

RiverMuse Pro records every event and processed alert separately, enabling analysis and reporting for business intelligence, forensics and compliance. Legacy IT operations management solutions in contrast modify and discard original events as they are worked on and cannot support compliance or forensics analysis. 

Built on an open platform, RiverMuse Pro can also dynamically enrich the events with contextual information from any external system or database. Service operations teams thus have access to all the actionable intelligence regarding an alert in one single console, and can bring up contextual tools to perform specific actions from within that environment.

Dual Commercial and Open Source Model

RiverMuse Pro builds on the free open source RiverMuse Core offering in some key aspects. It includes a robust, Java desktop based console that is the staple of Service and Network Operations centers. It offers native capabilities for external system and database access for enrichment. It streamlines the creation and reuse of rules through configuration packages and automates their provisioning based on event inflow. It also supports native integrations with dynamic infrastructures like VMware vSphere to enable real-time monitoring and management of virtualized environments.

 Community Based Collaboration

By taking a commercial open source route to software delivery, RiverMuse Pro leverages the power of the community as well.

“RiverMuse Pro offers a novel approach to community collaboration around IT operations management,” said Alec Leschin, VP Business Development, RiverMuse.  “We are building a platform that allows partners, customers and practitioners to contribute open source as well as commercial integrations in many different areas through an app store type format. Our architecture is built from the ground up to foster community participation – so as to stay ahead of a rapidly changing technology curve.”

RiverMuse Pro is committed to continuing the push towards innovation and making enterprise-class operations management functionality affordable to a new class of customers in the mid-market.

 About RiverMuse

Established in 2008, RiverMuse delivers next-generation real-time IT operations management software that uniquely enables service providers and enterprises to maintain the health of their increasingly complex and adaptive environments so they can optimize service levels, drive down costs and respond more nimbly to the changing needs of the business. The company was founded by the serial entrepreneurs who launched Micromuse and RiverSoft, which assure a majority of all public and private internet infrastructures in use today. For more information, please visit www.rivermuse.com.

RIVERMUSE LEVELS PLAYING FIELD IN SERVICE ASSURANCE MARKET WITH NEW COMMERCIAL OFFERING

Brings breakthrough Real-Time IT Operations Management for rapid problem isolation to Mid-Market Service Providers and Enterprises

May 12^th, Redwood City, CA: RiverMuse Inc, the provider of next generation, Real-Time IT Operations Management software today announced the availability of RiverMuse Pro v2.0, its commercial offering that enables mid-market service providers and enterprises to assure delivery of dynamic IT services through advanced event capture,  correlation and alerting. RiverMuse Pro consolidates IT events from all infrastructure components and monitoring tools into one centralized console for rapid problem detection and isolation, and assists in streamlining incident and problem management.

RiverMuse Pro provides additional functionality on top of the RiverMuse Core community edition, which is the first open source Manager of Managers software in the market. It delivers a number of industry innovations in IT event and fault management technology, details of which are covered in a separate press release entitled “RiverMuse raises the Innovation Bar in Real-Time IT Operations Management”.

Prior to the release of RiverMuse Pro, sophisticated, high-volume, and real-time IT event consolidation and correlation platforms were mostly implemented by larger Service Provider and Fortune 2000 organizations. These solutions are expensive, take several months to years to implement and require a large number of in-house or consulting staff to maintain. RiverMuse Pro completely disrupts this model with a next generation architecture, simplified configuration and automated capability to adjust to infrastructure shifts as they happen. Doing so, it levels the playing field among large and mid-size organizations that deal with the same kind of IT issues – but are on opposite sides when it comes to taking on complexity and cost into their operations organizations.

“RiverMuse is in a position to rapidly shape the service assurance market, bringing innovation and new technology into a domain that has stagnated for a decade or more,” said JL Valente, CEO of RiverMuse. “RiverMuse Pro brings powerful functionality in a single product compared to several products needed by the competition to address a similar set of challenges. While large organizations can definitely use RiverMuse Pro to dramatically lower cost of operations – we believe that mid-size service providers and enterprises will immediately benefit from faster time to resolve service issues that are pervasive today – and are our first order audience.”

RiverMuse Pro is able to consolidate IT events directly generated by system, network infrastructure, and application silos and also from the multiple monitoring tools in use today in mid-market environments. It identifies duplicate events, performs advanced time, priority and service dependency-based correlation; and then presents relevant and filtered alerts and notifications to operators for triage, action and resolution.

Without this level of correlation and filtering, operations personnel cannot fathom any actionable insight out of the millions of IT event messages thrown up by individual components or management systems. Larger organizations deploy expensive event consolidation and correlation technologies to manage high message volumes. In mid-size organizations however, these events are either turned off or discarded leading to loss of visibility and control, and causing reactive fire-fighting when end users are first to report service disruptions.

 “Sleek Networks was born out of the frustration that customers of large ISP and hosting providers often face over issues such as support, costs, systems integration and a general lack of willingness to be flexible. By dramatically reducing event noise, technologies like RiverMuse Pro can help mid-size providers become more streamlined and flexible from an IT Operations standpoint and gain further advantage over their larger competition”, stated Nick Williams, Operations Director at Sleek Networks, a mid-sized Managed Service Provider based in the UK.

RiverMuse Pro will continue to add out-of-the-box integrations with popular management tools, so that mid size service providers and enterprises are assured of rapid time to value to begin with. Further, with centralized management and configuration, it is easy to operate and maintain with minimal support staff making it feasible for mid-market adoption.

RiverMuse Pro is available today starting at $7,500 annual subscription cost for the entry level, which includes user license and support.

 About RiverMuse

Established in 2008, RiverMuse delivers next-generation real-time IT operations management software that uniquely enables service providers and enterprises to maintain the health of their increasingly complex and adaptive environments so they can optimize service levels, drive down costs and respond more nimbly to the changing needs of the business. The company was founded by the serial entrepreneurs who launched Micromuse and RiverSoft, which assure a majority of all public and private internet infrastructures in use today. For more information, please visit www.rivermuse.com.

It’s an exhilarating time at RiverMuse this week as we reach a notable milestone in our business with the launch of our new commercial product, RiverMuse Pro v2.0. It has taken us slightly longer than anticipated to get there but frankly it was worth the wait and the additional effort and intensity from our team, our partners and our beta customers. We are excited and proud to bring to the mid-market what we believe is genuine technical innovation in IT Operations management and I want to thank everyone that contributed to this major milestone.

Service providers and enterprises now have a viable solution to consolidate myriads of daily IT events from all infrastructure components and monitoring tools into one centralized console for rapid problem detection, isolation and resolution – thereby dramatically lowering cost of operations and improving customer experience. RiverMuse PRO builds on top of our open source platform with a number of unique innovative capabilities toward faster time to value, lower cost of ownership, and higher scalability. In addition to our free open source RiverMuse Core edition, we have decided to make RiverMuse Pro available for a 30-day free trial as well, so that users have the freedom to choose which edition is best for them. So feel free to check it out for yourself.

RiverMuse Pro includes unique capabilities around event capture and correlation, external data enrichment and centralized configuration that stays in step with infrastructure changes. I am also very excited with the prospect of further collaborating with our partners, VARs and system integrators who will benefit from a global marketplace setup by RiverMuse where they will be able to provide complementary products and services to our growing user community. I will cover this in detail in a separate post in the upcoming weeks.

In the meantime I invite you to download RiverMuse Pro, give it a test run in your environment and let me know what you think.

Ever since I first became involved with systems and network management tools (back in 1990) the idea of using a single vendor “framework”, versus buying “best of breed” tools from multiple sources has been in and out of favour with customers and “experts” alike. As an influential customer (as part of BT) I have had the opportunity to get pitched by both sides and consider both perspectives. From a purely theoretical standpoint it’s very difficult to accurately compare the relative merits of these approaches.

For example a “framework” supplier will tell you things like:

• They are easier and quicker to deploy.
• The vendor deals with all the integration headaches, saving you integration costs and time.
• If you have any problems you only have to negotiate with one supplier.
• One vendor can’t pass the buck to another, by saying it’s not our product that’s causing the problem it’s all the fault of someone else.

Whereas a “best of breed” tools supplier will counter with claims such as:

• You get the best solution for the job, not a “Jack of all trades master of none”.
• You can save money by encouraging competition for the components you need. Basically pitching one hungry supplier against another.
• You are at less risk of your chosen vendor disappearing from the market (all your eggs in one basket).
• Best of breed products are more “innovative” and “agile”, developed by people who are both keen and understand their space. Usually because they are smaller and hungrier.

Why frameworks seem attractive to mid size customers

For many medium sized customers concentrating on the theoretical advantages alone usually makes the “framework” approach appear to be a no-brainer. Especially attractive are the claims that they are quicker/easier to deploy, and that the single vendor deals with all the integration issues.

This desire to implement a framework solution is often further amplified by the fact that many medium sized customers have grown from small infrastructures – either organically or via mergers. In the small infrastructure tools world, nearly all solutions are “integrated products” from one vendor, fulfilling 80% to 90% of customer requirements. For decision makers in mid size companies, previous experience tells them that a single vendor integrated product works well. Consequently, as they move beyond the capabilities of the small tools (usually because they don’t scale, or do not have enough horizontal coverage for a medium size infrastructure) they think frameworks are the answer.

Why frameworks really don’t work for mid size customers

As always though the devil is in the details, and often times the theory and real life experience are at odds. My advice would be to visit existing medium/large customers (similar in size as your organization) who have implemented frameworks and check first hand. When you do, talk to the people on the ground “using the tools” rather than only with the senior managers.

In my experience, most customers with medium sized infrastructures that I have visited over the years have experienced a number of significant issues implementing frameworks (regardless of who the supplier is). For example one customer I visited told me they had developed 75% of the solution in-house (over two years) to make the framework solution they had picked work in their environment.

- Con Blackett

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.

In this scenario, small and mid-size enterprises (SME’s) need to make the leap to the next-tier of IT management sophistication. What has been a huge barrier until now is the high cost and complexity of Enterprise-class operations management tools. Not any more – as a new breed of tools including RiverMuse Core and Pro is bridging the gap of cost, simplicity, functionality and business models to enable SME’s make the move.

As we discuss in the WhitePaper some of the key IT Operations Management challenges that mid-size enterprise and MSP organizations face today include -

i) Rise in the Volume and Complexity of Events  – more applications, dynamic infrastructures, rapid changes, distributed components – are all contributing to an explosion in the number of operations events and faults that IT has to contend with.

ii) Moving from Infrastructure Operations to Service-Centric Operations - it is no longer enough to just manage a component of the network or the datacenter – the IT manager in the mid-size enterprise has to be able to define, monitor and assure end-to-end services.

iii) Swivel Chair management of multiple monitoring Systems – specialized components with their own management mechanisms have a created a veritable zoo of management consoles. The result? No complete view of the service and silo-based operations that slow down operational response.

iv) Lack of Centralized, Enterprise Wide Operations Management – with event and performance data sitting in different databases and reporting systems – any kind of intelligent correlation is left to the skill of the operator. And as the volumes of event scale up – this process is well but broken. 

v) The Demand for Scalable, Real-time Operations – most of the new application services demand near real-time operational response. Think VoiP, video conferencing, social media based collaboration and so on. The issue is mid-size monitoring tools weren’t built for high volume, scalable event processing and hence critical insight into the infrastructure is lost as they filter out most events – even critical ones.

Do you agree with the set of challenges described above? Do you think there are other problem areas with regards to IT Operations management that we miss here? Let us know.