A Monitoring Odyssey,
      ...with Monolith Software

External validation is always great to receive.  Recently I have gotten some wonderful feedback from a few new Channel Partners that we’ve brought aboard this year.  Just yesterday I received an email from the CEO of a large VAR/consulting company who had the experience of going on a week’s worth of appointments in Europe with Bill Cannon, Monolith’s VP of Sales.  Here is his feedback in an email to me:

“Jeff,

I just wanted to drop you a mail to say Thank You.

Having Bill over here this week  was eye-opening, I have been blown away by the reaction of people in ALL the companies we went to see this week.  In all my years in this business I have never seen such a level of interest from such a disparate group of companies in such a short time.  I know it is early days but I really think we will do a lot of business with Monolith and I think we will both have a lot of happy customers.”

It is my belief that the monitoring & management market has seen very little advancement in the past decade.  The majority of activity that has occurred has been acquisition-based, by what I like to call the Big Four Aggregators.  It seems as though actually developing software – writing your own code – is a thing of the past.  Buying varying code sets, putting them on your price list and calling it a framework offering just doesn’t seem to be the best approach if your goal is to lower costs, increase operational efficiency, perform advanced correlation, improve visibility though comprehensive dashboarding or delivering automated SLM capabilities.

When prospective customers hear the Monolith story, they get excited.  We spent a decade selling and implementing software from other vendors in the market, and came to the realization that there MUST be a better way.  We then went to work building the industry’s only (to my knowledge) monitoring and management solution that is 100% built from the ground up by us (no acquired code), is 100% browser based & plug-in free, and addresses the key monitoring disciplines of discovery, mapping, correlation, fault/event management, performance management, dashboarding, & service level management.

If you believe in simplicity versus complexity;  if you believe in the advantages of pre-built integration versus manual integration;  if you are interested in seeing what an integrated code set solution can deliver versus an acquired patchwork of code; then Monolith Software just might be what you are looking for.

Cheers,

Jeff

At Monolith Software, we’ve tried to focus as much as possible on development and innovation.  Every day we see customers with growing management challenges.  The only way to meet those growing challenges is with innovative and flexible software solutions, informed by real-world operational requirements.

Version 3.5 of Monolith, released last month, represents the latest lessons we’ve learned from our customers in the industry.  From dashboard mashups (a.k.a. our custom URL widget) to abnormal behavior, the common thread in all of our new features and improved functions is ‘technology designed to solve real problems.’

You’ve heard us say in the past that not a whole lot has changed in the technology management market in the past decade.  Check out Monolith Software Version 3.5, and see how we plan to change that.

Technorati Tags:
Monolith Software, Technology Monitoring, Visibility

IT Dashboards have accumulated a bit of a mixed record: a good dashboard supported by clear policies and procedures can improve the quality of services delivered and make business and technology decisions easier.  But even the best dashboards are somewhat myopic, and badly designed dashboards can lead to complacency, poor communication and eventually overlooked issues, degradations or outages.

From the beginning, Monolith’s dashboards have been characterized by their ease-of-use.  With our custom dashboard engine, customers started with a blank page and could drag-and-drop event and performance icons and graphs, linking icons to any availability indicator, performance metric or event filter they prefer.  The icons and the parameters they represent can be displayed on any backdrop,  map or branding theme.  This open design allows for true end-to-end monitoring, and gives customers the flexibility to choose their own KPIs while avoiding onerous development requirements.  Want to show all of the infrastructure underlying a service, from fiber to routers to servers, in terms of availability, link status, utilization and trending on a single dashboard?  No problem.  If you can measure it or discover it, you can add it to your dashboard.  We’ve seen untrained, un-coached Monolith users develop sophisticated global technology dashboards in a few hours.

With our latest release, Monolith has worked with customers to deliver the next iteration of visualization enhancements — dashboard mashups.  Now, in addition to the custom display you built to portray your technology or service infrastructure, you can add a frame to display recent trouble tickets from your ticketing system, a frame for configuration management, and another showing the local weather or news.  Combine or consolidate any information displays to give you all the information you need on a single heads up display.

Nobody can anticipate the precise information you need to monitor your technology environment.  Your visualization tools need to be flexible and easy to implement.  Check out our recent webinar with Oracle to see an example of this technology in action, or contact us to learn more about this important aspect of your monitoring strategy.

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IT Dashboards, Visualization, Monolith Software, KPIs, dashboard mashup

We often use this blog to address strategies we think are flawed– like trying to deliver comprehensive monitoring through a patchwork of acquired tools.

Now and then we need to highlight the strategy we’ve chosen: constant and consistent improvement of a uniform software solution, across a range of technology monitoring operations.

In the coming weeks we will detail a few of our latest developments.  These new capabilities will lead to an even more integrated monitoring solution, and further cement our edge in technology monitoring for service providers and large enterprise.

Monolith Software began by addressing the need for better event/fault management, creating a powerful tool that consolidated, normalized and correlated faults and events from any input or technology type.  Then we extended the normalization model to performance management, giving operations groups the ability to standardize any time-series data coming from their infrastructure.  Finally, we created a flexible dashboarding engine that enables customers to re-purpose and distribute their data as determined by business needs, and an SLM/BSM function that advanced automated, metric-driven service level management.

Given those abilities, what if you could now perform discovery, automatic topology mapping and probable root-cause analysis (PRCA) across multiple technology domains (e.g. telco, systems, applications, networks, and voice?)

What if your monitoring tool could correlate between all the topologies from layer 0 (fiber) to layer 7 (presentation), acting as a “Manager of Mangers” for topology?  If that monitoring tool could recognize and correlate virtual servers and interfaces just as accurately as physical servers and interfaces?  What if topology data included configurations pulled from every server and network device, and config changes and differentials were used to inform root-cause analysis?

This is cross-domain correlation.  We’ve been working with our customers to develop the ability, and our new release marks a turning point for the capability.

Monolith’s new multi-layer topology is designed based on our foundational principles of a single database, normalization of all monitoring data, and a flexible, scalable architecture.  The result is not only the best visualization and correlation capability in the industry, but one of the first software solutions that addresses monitoring of cloud/virtualized environments with something other than just marketing.

This enhanced topology has a number of secondary impacts in terms of automation and accuracy: better SLM; better PRCA; easier integration with inventory and provisioning systems leading to a clear understanding of circuits, customers and billing; the ability to audit and reconcile between discovered topology and recorded inventory.  In short, it’s a big step forward in facilitating, validating, and visualizing service delivery.

We encourage you to take a look at what’s new at Monolith.  Next week we’ll introduce some more new features, including some exciting improvements to our existing performance and event management capabilities.  And as always, better than half of our new features come directly from customer feedback.

We’re don’t just talk about what works and what doesn’t in technology monitoring.  We listen, and we act.

Technorati Tags:
Monolith Software, Technology Monitoring, Topology, PRCA, SLM, inventory, Cross Domain Correlation

The founders of Monolith Software spent the better part of a decade working with the products of the industry’s legacy leaders in the monitoring & management space.  Judging from the freely-offered comments made by customers over the years, users of established software packages were adamant and unanimous in their frustration with having to rely on signed clients or browsers with Active-X or JRE (java runtime engines) in order to use the software.

When we decided to start a software company, we took what seemed to be a logical approach – building software that responds to the needs of the user community.  We didn’t see this as a particularly novel or unconventional strategy.  However, when you honestly evaluate the response of the industry to these concerns, the strategy actually appears somewhat unique.

About four years ago we needed to make a presentation layer decision.  There were three common approaches being utilized by our competitors:

1. Our legacy competitors were using Java, which everyone hated because of compatibility/speed/efficiency issues
2. Newer competitors were backing Flash, which was proprietary to Adobe and was more bandwidth intensive
3. Some were still pushing signed clients in order to use their software

At Monolith Software we decided to back industry STANDARDS.  We ended up leveraging a standard browser interface with SVG for the presentation capabilies.  As anyone following this space knows, HTML5 is essentially just that.  It’s nice to see some solid validation for the decision we made years ago:  Flash is suffering, HTML5 is gaining momentum.  Don’t just take our word for it: look at what the folks at Apple are doing, and why.  Well-defined and developed universal standards will almost always represent less risk to a company, and eventually better performance and compatibility, than a proprietary product like Flash.

That decision has allowed Monolith users greater flexibility: they can access Monolith freely on any web-enabled mobile device.  So, for instance, a Monolith user can access IT dashboards from an iPhone or iPad without licensing any app.

You can access more info on our standard architecture here.

Technorati Tags:
Flash, HTML5, IT Dashboards, Monolith Software

Hey Folks, sorry for the delay in posting this one.  It’s been in my draft folder for a couple of weeks now.

I recently read the Network World article titled, “Cloud or customers? Why CA wanted Nimsoft” by Denise Dubie.  I thought this announcement deserved a bit of comment.

I did some recent searches in Google News.  Found some interesting quotes:

“The [Nimsoft] acquisition immediately strengthens CA’s position in the mid-market, while allowing them to grow their managed service provider business,” a recent research report reads. “Over the last two years, CA did a good job of gradually changing its reputation from a company that is making acquisitions just to improve its revenue stream (or get emerging competitors out of the way) to a vendor that has a very clear vision, and it is buying only the missing pieces to a large puzzle they had envisioned.”

“”This presents a major test for CA to prove once and for all that it is no longer a company ‘where software goes to die,’” the report reads.

“CA obviously sees the cloud computing as a high potential investment, but isn’t it too early to be putting so much faith in it, given that there is no consensus even on its definition?”

So, by my count we have seen CA purchase the following companies — 3Tera, Oblicore, Cassatt, Nimsoft, NetQoS, Concord (eHealth/Spectrum).  This has all been since 2005.  It kind of makes you wonder what  you would have been buying from CA prior to 2005.  I wrote about the CA acquisition of NetQoS in the blog post, “The Performance Management Market and Customer Portals.”  If you read that blog post and then consider the Nimsoft acquisition you’ve really got to ask yourself, “what is this strategy?”  Between Concord eHealth, NetQoS Net Voyant and Nimsoft you now have three overlapping products in the performance management space.  You have two overlapping event consoles.  Two different topology solutions.  As a prospective CA customer, I would certainly be wondering what solutions are going to come out on top.

Anyone who has read my blog posts knows that I am not a fan of the acquisition based strategies.  The acquiring company is left with a disparate set of code bases that were written in different languages with different front ends, different back ends, different device entity stores, etc.  The late 1990’s and the early part of this century were the time of best of breed.  If you can remember back that long, then you certainly remember how long it took to deploy these solutions.  How is a monitoring and management strategy built upon mass acquisitions any better?  It is still an integration nightmare.   Also, how do you know what technology is going to come out on top?  Is it really the best technology?  Do you really think the deployment and maintenance of this hodge podge of code is any easier?

Technorati Tags:
CA, Nimsoft, Monolith Software, Acquisition

How often do you hear that an IT group is bragging about the quality of their network services provided to the organization -while backing it all up with simple to read dashboard reports?  Not often!  Well, that’s exactly what Craig Yappert, senior director of global IT at Oracle is doing.

To achieve these bragging rights, Craig had to evolve from a patchwork of overlapping network monitoring systems that could not properly provide an integrated view to monitor Oracle’s carrier-class network. The decision was made to implement Monolith Software to tie it all together and shift to a service level management focus.

The net result: Craig is now retiring many of the traditional monitoring systems that were in place, and using Monolith as the main engine for Oracle’s real-time service level management dashboard.

“With Monolith, you don’t need to be a programmer to build technical and business level dashboards.  The goal was to be more proactive and improve our network quality and Monolith is helping us achieve those goals to the point where I am now exposing our IT service quality to the customers we serve through a series of dashboard views,” said Craig.

To view how Craig is using Monolith to deliver a new level of quality services on a global, carrier-class network (supporting over 8,500 employees and 4.5 million Oracle OnDemand users,) join Craig and Monolith on a April 6^th Webinar: Real-time Service Assurance Management.  Craig will be sharing a live look into Oracle’s network to demonstrate how he provides better service level management.

Technorati Tags:
Oracle, Network Services, Service Assurance, Service Level Management, SLM, Business Service Management, BSM

Real-time Service Assurance Management

Featuring Live Views into Oracle’s Performance Dashboards

** 3/30 – UPDATED – Fixed broken links.

Register for the webinar.

Jeff Parker, president of Monolith Software will join Craig Yappert, senior director at Oracle, to showcase Oracle’s use of Monolith to report on services delivered to 4.5 Million Oracle On Demand end-users and 85,000 employees over their 10,000-device global network.

Attendees will receive a live view into Oracle’s carrier-class network to experience rich dashboards and see how to apply flexible, programmatic functionality to easily manipulate data by location, service, technology or severity.

The webinar will begin at 1PM CDT.  Both speakers will be available for questions.

Register HERE.

Technorati Tags:
Oracle, Monolith Software, Service Assurance, Performance Monitoring, Dashboards, Network Monitoring

Doing a little research on the internet provides some interesting perspective on EMC’s powerful framework management solutions.  Below is a  snippit from the press release on  one of EMC’s many acquisitions in the monitoring & management arena.  I think that the quote effectively indicates EMC’s overall managing strategy:

“The acquisition complements and extends EMC’s position in the rapidly-emerging IT Service Management marketplace.  EMC’s leadership in cross-domain incident and problem management will be combined with Voyence’s network change and configuration management to provide premier closed-loop orchestration, enabling customers to address the complexities associated with intersection of problem and change management.”

From the number of releases in recent years with similar language, it becomes clear that EMC was out to utilize an acquisition-based approach to build a tightly integrated framework to enable customers to proactively monitor and manage their complex IT infrastructures.  Certainly an interesting approach, though no points for originality.  No need to actually write any software.  Just acquire 6 different software companies any glue it all together.  How wonderful for the customers that are early adopters of this visionary approach!  This storage vendor can now emulate the acquire-versus-innovate approach of the Big 4 to deliver another piecemeal-derived framework.

Except, they have now decided to break it all apart and split it up between VMware and EMC.  EMC will keep Smarts and Voyence and VMware will pick up Infra, ConfigureSoft, FastScale and nLayers.  Now what exactly do we interpret from all this?  The strategy didn’t make sense in the first place?  Network management and application management don’t belong together?  There is no need to have a comprehensive and holistic service management solution for complex IT infrastructures?  Storage providers do not understand IT Service Management?  It’s harder to tie together disparate code sets that it at first appeared?

Nah, I’m sure that is just my humble perspective.  I am sure some marketing and PR brain child will explain how this is all part of the master vision to do something that somehow makes a lot of sense.

Cheers!

Technorati Tags:
EMC, VMWare, Framework, Technology Monitoring, Monolith Software

In this blog, we talk a lot about the challenges faced by organizations trying to cope with multiplying services, diverse technologies and siloed monitoring and management tools.  You will also hear us mention that these challenges are far more daunting when services like VOIP and video need to be delivered globally and without interruption.

In our latest case study, Oracle’s Senior Director of Enterprise Automation & Tooling, Tony Miranda, talks about Oracle’s decision to consolidate monitoring and management of their global networks with Monolith.

In a worldwide implementation that took mere weeks to complete, Monolith has allowed this global business software giant to simplify fault, availability and performance monitoring across the company, while cutting licensing, headcount, hardware, and annual maintenance costs.  Oracle’s team now uses Monolith’s dashboard engine to quickly create custom real-time IT dashboards, improving executive visibility across their entire network.

Oracle turned to Monolith to monitor and manage global services.  Shouldn’t you? Read the full case study.

Technorati Tags:
Monolith Software, IT Management, fault, availability, performance monitoring, dashboards, Oracle