ManageEngine Bolsters Performance Management Tools

September 4, 2012 Alex Woodie

Keeping applications running well can be a challenge in today’s complex, heterogeneous IT environments. Users don’t care whether their apps are running in “the cloud,” on a giant mainframe, or a cluster of PC servers. All they care about is whether the apps work and how quickly they respond. IT tool maker ManageEngine was at VMworld last week to announce several product updates that aim to simplify performance management in virtualized environments.

Frustrated by slow applications, organizations around the world are turning to application performance management (APM) tools to help them get a handle on performance problems. According to a recent report by Gartner, the APM tool segment will grow 9 percent in 2012, becoming a $2.14 billion market.

APM tools can help organizations identify issues with their applications, and then fix them. Larger organizations especially can be confounded by complex IT infrastructures that span multiple on-premise platforms, virtualized environments, and the cloud. Getting a handle on all of these areas can be a challenge, which is why they turn to automated APM tools.

ManageEngine used last week’s VMworld conference to showcase several APM-related enhancements across several products, including Applications Manager, OpManager, and IT 360. It also discussed with IT Jungle a new website monitoring service that will be available at a later time.

Applications Manager has been enhanced with capacity planning functionality for virtualized environments. This is a critical area of need for companies that have struggled to manage their virtual environments, and may have over-committed server resources to some virtual machines (VMs) and under-resourced other VMs, explains ManageEngine president Raj Sabhlok.

“The new capacity planning reports we’re introducing allow you to set a baseline for optimized utilization of a VM,” Sabhlok says. “You can set up these parameters to be specific to your business. Periodically, Apps Manager will run these reports and say, ‘This is a VM that’s underutilized and this is a VM that’s over-utilized,’ and give you the ability to reconfigure or redeploy as necessary.”

ManageEngine is also supporting virtualization products with an update of its network management software, called OpManager. OpManager, which actually provides more than network monitoring, is now able to dynamically resize the memory allocation of VMware vCenter environments based on monitored utilization rates and a pre-set baseline. This feature is still in beta.

The company’s IT management console, called IT 360, is also getting better visibility into virtualized environments. When IT 360 debuted about two years ago, it brought together the alerts generated by various ManageEngine products, including Applications Manager, OpManager, and its service desk offering, to a single place, where an administrator could effectively monitor and respond to changes in the IT infrastructure. Now, IT 360 is getting support for VMware’s vCenter Server environments, providing insight into any problems or issues that occur in those environments.

ManageEngine is only supporting the mainstream hypervisors with the new virtualization functionality announced last week. Applications Manager’s new capacity planning functions will support VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix products, while OpManager and IT360 will only support VMware.

ManageEngine doesn’t currently have plans to support the hypervisors from IBM and Oracle. That means that, while Applications Manager does have insight into IBM i environments, it won’t be analyzing logical partition (LPAR) usage on IBM i servers, via the PowerVM hypervisor. “[PowerVM] is really not our sweet spot. We’re supporting the Unix, Linux, Windows environments specifically,” Sabhlok says.

A future update to Applications Manager will support .NET transactions, Sabhlok said. The software provides full instrumentation of other types of applications, but the capability to monitor .NET transactions along their course will provide Windows shops with more opportunities to do real-time testing and monitoring of transactions.

Sabhlok also discussed with IT Jungle a new service offering called Site 24/7 that will provide continuous monitoring of customers’ websites. The new offering, which will be rolled out later this year, “is completely focused on Web apps and the performance and end-user experience of the Web apps,” Sabhlok says.