Service Provider Monitoring


Virtualization, Data Center Complexity, Acquisition of Hyper9

Posted on: January 27th, 2011 by AccelOps No Comments

The Solarwinds acquisition of Hyper9 demonstrates the accelerating importance of manageability within the virtual data center. Although this deal aligns with their business model, does it really align with what the market needs in terms of decreasing operational complexity?

We are seeing increased interest in the consolidation of management tools to ease support and maintenance burdens and to increase operational efficiencies. Juggling multiple consoles, data sources and communication modes while trying to quickly identify root cause and restore service is

not easily accomplished through a piecemeal portfolio of tools. The silos within IT still exist as you’ve done nothing to address the inherent technical and organizational challenge of aligning all stakeholders.

The AccelOps platform provides a single view with end-to-end visibility across disparate elements of the IT operational environment. As with the HP acquisition of Arcsight, the AccelOps strategy of offering an integrated IT operations platform appears to be a vision the market is rapidly adopting. An HP executive says it best – “we believe organizations need a new approach, an approach where security and IT operations are converged, not siloed… an approach that is holistic and proactive.”

We couldn’t agree more.

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AccelOps Receives Frost & Sullivan 2011 Global New Product Innovation Award

Posted on: January 21st, 2011 by AccelOps No Comments

Today Frost & Sullivan recognized Accelops with the 2011 Global New product innovation of the year award for Enterprise and Service Provider Infrastructure/Cloud monitoring. It’s a great pleasure to start off the new year with this kind of recognition.

The award is based on analysis of monitoring and management products for enterprise, hosting providers and managed service providers. In the 2.1 release, Accelops added support for service providers (MSP) and hosting providers.

Here are some key highlights from the award:



The Frost & Sullivan Award for Global New Product Innovation is presented to the company that has demonstrated superior technology, functional innovation and differentiation within its industry that results in increased customer value and market potential. AccelOps was chosen from a category comprised of eight leading vendors that were assessed for consideration of this award. Top companies were reviewed according to Frost & Sullivan’s best practice methodology consisting of industry and category analysis, strategic vendor assessment, product appraisal and customer interviews.

“The company leverages leading-edge technologies to enable service providers and large enterprises to monitor cloud and virtual environments,” said Frost & Sullivan Lead Industry Analyst Olga Yashkova. “Of particular interest in our evaluation were the company’s integration, functional depth and innovative use of the virtual appliance architecture to enable dynamic clustering.”

For a more in-depth view of Frost & Sullivan’s analysis, read their report at http://www.accelops.net/pdf/AccelOps_Frost_Sullivan_IRG.pdf

Press release at http://www.accelops.net/news/pressreleases.php#fs-011911

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Elasticity and Scalability

Posted on: January 10th, 2011 by Imin Lee No Comments

For data center operators, cloud operators, and service providers, being able to grow their business and scale up is one of the major topics of discussion. Large enterprises, when managing large IT infrastructures and multiple business units, share the same requirements. Elasticity is another topic of interest in recent cloud computing discussions enabling IT as a utility or as a pay-per-use model.

In order to be elastic, and to pay only for true usage, management software needs to be able to scale up and down. Management and monitoring capability needs to change according to the data center and cloud environment’s computation power: network traffic, flows, packets, logs/events, metrics, and devices. Therefore, being able to scale is a prerequisite of being able to elastic.

A recent visit to a global Fortune 100 enterprise highlighted the strengths of AccelOps versus our major competition. Simply having multiple copies of a SIEM appliance, whether virtual or otherwise, is not synonymous with being able to scale out event cross-correlation capabilities. True elasticity requires clustered cross correlation capabilities, dynamic deployment of virtual appliances for more processing power, usage accounting, and a flexible licensing model. This is Elastic EPS and AccelOps provides this unique capability in our Integrated Data center and Cloud Monitoring solution.

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Cloud Computing and Service Provider Focused Management

Posted on: January 4th, 2011 by Imin Lee No Comments

A year ago, I was reading a cloud computing report from Lazard Capital and I could not agree more with them: cloud computing is not about technology, it is all about the business model; it is about how IT is consumed as a utility. So the data center is still made up of servers, storage, networking and security equipment. But how the data center is used or offered as a service is the key topic of interest.

One year later, at Gartner’s Datacenter Conference, cloud computing was greatly demystified. It is no longer something as fuzzy and remotely untouchable as a cloud in the sky anymore. Instead, more concrete definitions of cloud computing, its characteristics, and initial success stories in the real-world have been shared among analysts, vendors, and industry practitioners.

Management Software, whether it is provisioning, monitoring, or the help-desk, needs to meet the following requirements:

  • Service-result focus: whether it can quickly and easily allow service providers bring up new services, add new clients etc.
  • Shared/Multi-tenancy: an environment where multiple organizations or customers are hosted and managed. An efficient way to view, mark, and control them is key, but at the same time reducing the operational overhead of multiple solutions and their corresponding investment costs.
  • Utility-based and usage-chargeable: can the management software support the IT-as-utility model by understanding how each organization and each customer uses resources, and provide the option of charging the customers accordingly.
  • Scalable and Elastic: the goal of the service provider is to efficiently service many different customers. Can they easily scale to hundreds of customers? Service providers employ a recurring revenue and fee-based model so their licensing framework needs to be flexible and allow for unpredictable growth.


If you look at these characteristics, you will see that they are the common practices and requirements seen day-in and day-out in the service provider world, whether it is the traditional telephone service provider, or power and electricity providers. In other words, the data center, whether public or private, needs to run and operate like a service provider. If so, the management software is the key layer that considers all of the moving parts in the data center to provide the concerted effort of ‘IT as utility’.

Up to this point, management software of the last 10 – 20 years was focused on the traditional enterprise model. Many vendors’ products were built with one single organization in mind. Although they have been used in many enterprises and service providers , they are in fact serving the management of the data center, not the cloud (again, a difference in the business model). Therefore, in order to provide the ‘IT as a utility’ business model , one can not just say ‘we have been serving the datacenters and service providers, therefore we are serving cloud computing’.

A 10-20 year old tool cannot all of a sudden become a cloud computing software platform. As a matter of fact, many private and public data centers, and service providers, in the current transition phase to cloud computing or a utility computing business model, are feeling the pain of trying to put a square peg into a round hole. As a result, they are giving up on the legacy solutions and looking elsewhere for innovative solutions that realistically address the requirements and characteristics of cloud computing.

We encourage data center operators, cloud operators, and service providers to investigate these characteristics in management software. You will find exactly that with AccelOps’ Integrated Datacenter and Cloud Monitoring Platform.

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MSP Software and Managing Private Cloud / Hybrid Cloud Environments

Posted on: October 26th, 2010 by AccelOps No Comments

MSP Software and Managing Private Cloud / Hybrid Cloud Environments

Bojan Simic of TRAC Research suggests “Management Tools for MSPs (Managed Service Providers) Could Come in Handy in the Private Cloud.”  The industry analyst writes, “deployments of private cloud services are driving IT organizations to act like internal service providers (ala managed service providers). For that reason, many of the capabilities that BSM (Business Service Management) vendors built to make their solutions more appealing to the managed service provider market could be very valuable for the management of private cloud environments.”  This is more than noteworthy insight on the use of managed service monitoring / MSP monitoring software.

Whether you are a MSP / Managed Service Provider, Hosting Service Provider or large enterprise, meeting service commitments and achieving operational efficiencies demands oversight of the dynamic provisioning within virtual environments (virtualization management) and the extended data center.

It will also necessitate more automated methods to efficiently define, monitor and maintain logical service groups of respective infrastructure and application components.  Not for the task of simply mapping a service, but more so to identify, activate and cross-correlate the component’s various operational controls with regards to performance, availability, changes and security.  The result of which enables proactive management and expedites root-cause analysis to meet service levels.

Lastly, it will require the tracking of shared and client-specific resources, both on-premise and off-premise, for the purpose of optimization, usage metering and capacity planning.  Sound familiar – these tenets for Business Service Management, which align with Managed Service Provider / MSP software requirements, do indeed support managing private and hybrid clouds.  They also happen to be core competencies within AccelOps’ integrated data center and cloud service monitoring platform.

Bojan further asserts, “In order for these technologies to benefit the users of private cloud services, they need to include a set of additional functionalities that will make them effective in managing virtualized and dynamic infrastructure. However, the capabilities such as multi-tenancy, SLA management or the ability to calculate service chargebacks have been essential for using BSM (Business Service Management) solutions in the MSP (Managed Service Provider) market and they are equally as important in managing private cloud environments.”  We couldn’t agree more.

Multi-tenancy relates to software architecture where by one instance of the software can serve multiple organization or customer “tenants.”  While computing resources are shared, the software virtually partitions functionality to support data and configuration of each client.  From a client perspective, the client works with their own virtual instance and respective data. From a MSP / Manager Service Provider or enterprise perspective, an integrated data center monitoring platform with rich multi-tenancy and customization features offers the foundation upon which cloud computing advantages can be realized.

AccelOps offers managed service providers (MSP) and enterprise customers multi-tenancy that streamlines multi-client/division and multi-site (on-premise and off-premise) discovery, configuration, distributed collection, analytics, monitoring, dashboards, alerting and reporting.  Our multi-tenant implementation is all presented through a consolidated web console – avoiding the cost and administrative burden of managing multiple monitoring components and a variety of portals.

AccelOps is not just software that operates as a virtual appliance. Plenty of conventional software applications have been ported to run on a virtual machine.  The AccelOps platform was designed on a virtual cluster architecture that takes advantage of internal parallel processing, load balancing and multi-tenancy, as well as leveraging VMware’s provisioning and high-availability attributes. This provides on-demand deployment and scalability to address the heavy analysis and reporting throughput demands common in MSP / Managed Service Provider and cloud computing environments.

We welcome Manage Service Providers (MSP), Hosting Service Providers and large enterprises to explore AccelOps’ integrated approach – whether used as MSP monitoring software or as a data center monitoring platform for private cloud / hybrid cloud management.  Takes us for a test drive via our Free 30-day trial program.

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