Neebula ServiceWatch – A True Management Solution for Virtual Environments

Virtualization is becoming the de facto standard platform for servers in IT organizations.

Unfortunately, it introduces new management challenges that range from avoiding VM sprawl to how to manage an existing business service.

The Management Challenge

Although the use of virtual environments provides great benefits, it increases management overhead dramatically. It places infrastructure components, which change on a real-time basis, outside the direct control of the IT staff.

The performance of virtual machines depends on:

• their hosting infrastructure components
• their location
• the influence of the virtual machines on each other

The major goal of the IT infrastructure is to provide services to the business. To ensure the availability of critical business services, IT Operations maps out how the infrastructure supports every business service. With existing BSM management tools, this map must be created and maintained manually, a tedious and error prone task even in non-virtualized environments. In virtualized environments, the dynamic nature of the environment makes it extremely challenging if not impossible.
In short, the more virtualized the environment, the less control one has on the availability of critical services.

From the beginning, Neebula developed Neebula ServiceWatch with virtual environments in mind. It is designed specifically to tackle the inherent management challenges of IT environments that include both virtual and physical components.

Neebula ServiceWatch automatically models and maps the applications, servers, network elements, and storage devices, against business services. Because automatic service modeling replaces manual modeling, service topology is updated on a real-time basis.

Using its accurate and up-to-date service model for impact and root-cause analysis, Neebula ServiceWatch improves service levels by shortening business service maintenance times and time to recover from failures.