Micromuse Inc. - Network Management Software - Category Directory

139 Townsend Street
San Francisco, California 94107
(415) 538-9090
www.micromuse.com

Sales

$126 million

Business Description

Micromuse develops, markets and supports a family of scalable, highly configurable, rapidly deployable software solutions that enable service and business assurance—the effective monitoring of the status of multiple devices and elements underlying an Information Technology (IT) service delivery infrastructure, to help provide the continuous availability of IT-based services and businesses. The Micromuse Netcool® product suite collects, normalizes and consolidates high volumes of event information from heterogeneous network management environments into an active database that de-duplicates and correlates the resulting data in real-time. It then rapidly distributes graphical views of the information to operators and administrators responsible for monitoring service levels. Netcool’s unique architecture allows for the rapid, programmerless association of devices and specific attributes of those devices to the business services they impact. This readily enables network operations teams to create and modify their service views during systems operations to monitor particular business services, rapidly identify which users are affected by which network faults, pinpoint sources of network problems, automate operator responses, facilitate problem resolution and report on the results.

We market and distribute to customers through our own sales force, OEMs, value-added resellers and systems integrators.

Products and Technology

Micromuse provides a suite of software products that enable business and service assurance for enterprises and service providers. Our Netcool solutions include the flagship Netcool/OMNIbus™ product family, which collects, consolidates, de-duplicates and correlates information from more than 1,000 network management platforms and devices and presents realtime user-configurable views of faults, network, service and business status. This product family allows network operations personnel to react to problems in their network infrastructure before they cause outages in service availability and/or to identify outages and their probable causes. These capabilities enable network managers to improve the reliability and functionality of their networks, thereby enhancing operating efficiencies, productivity and profitability of network operators and users. The components of the Netcool/OMNIbus Product Family are described in the section entitled “Netcool/OMNIbus Product Family.”

Micromuse also provides several other product families that work in conjunction with Netcool/OMNIbus and provide enhanced business and service assurance capabilities. These include the Netcool/Service Monitors™ product family, the Netcool/Precision™ product family, the Netcool/Impact™ product family and the Netcool/Dashboards™ product family.

In addition, the Netcool suite includes packaged software “solutions” comprised of product family components and targeted to specific customer environments. These solutions include:

• Netcool for Voice Networks™

• Netcool for Security Management™

• Netcool for Asset Management™

• Netcool for Voice Over IP™

Brief descriptions of the Netcool product families are provided below:

Netcool/OMNIbus Product Family

Micromuse’s flagship Netcool/OMNIbus product family provides realtime business and service assurance. As the cornerstone of the Netcool suite, it collects and consolidates events and alarms from more than 1,000 IT environments in realtime—and presents this information to IT executives and operations personnel in an intuitive, graphical console. Netcool/OMNIbus provides realtime monitoring, management, and event de-duplication and helps organizations proactively manage their IT infrastructures to ensure continuous uptime of business services and applications. Environments supported by Netcool/OMNIbus include business applications, Windows and UNIX systems, data switches, voice switches, IP routers, frameworks and others.

The Netcool ObjectServer™, the core component of Netcool/OMNIbus, is a high-speed database that collects event information from throughout the infrastructure. Netcool Probes & Monitors™ collect event messages from throughout the IT infrastructure and forward them to the Netcool ObjectServer for consolidation, filtering, de-duplication, suppression, and analysis.

The Netcool suite also provides Executive Dashboards that allow you to customize realtime views of operations and business services, based on geography, department, or supporting IT resources. Point-and-click interfaces allow you to address and prioritize the resolution of IT problems based upon their business or customer impact. Designed to meet the needs of both IT executives and operations personnel, the Netcool dashboards provide a ‘birds-eye’ view of services as well as detailed analysis of specific IT resources.

Netcool Probes & Monitors collect and consolidate data from over 1,000 environments off-the-shelf. Netcool manages events at the device and system level while also testing service and application availability from the service user’s perspective.

Netcool Gateways™ interface to third-party databases and applications that need to share event data interactively with the Netcool/OMNIbus realtime event database engine. Examples of gateway-supported environments include Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server, Informix, Remedy, Clarify (Amdocs), Vantive (PeopleSoft), Siebel, and Metasolv.

Using generic probes, proprietary probes, standards-based probes (such as SNMP trapd and TL1), gateways, and monitors, Netcool/OMNIbus can collect data from virtually any networked environment.

Netcool/Monitors Product Family

Supporting a variety of IP, Internet and wireless-based services and applications, Netcool/Monitors use ‘synthetic transactions’ to monitor availability and performance over fixed line and wireless infrastructures.

Netcool/Application Service Monitors™ (ASMs) provide detailed application and database monitoring for Oracle, Microsoft SQL, Microsoft Exchange, Apache and MS IIS. Netcool/ASMs monitor a variety of metrics from these applications and offer suggested resolution procedures aimed at repairing problems.

Netcool/System Service Monitors™ (SSMs) accurately measure the availability and performance of host systems and applications running on them. Its distributed systems management includes CPU utilization, memory utilization, and disk space and can track blocks, inodes, total and free files in each file system. Netcool/SSMs can also manage running processes and execute restarts when they go down.

Netcool/Data Center Monitors™ (DCMs) consolidate realtime management from IBM mainframe and midrange systems—the IBM S/390 (IBM zSeries) and IBM AS/400 (IBM iSeries). Netcool/DCMs allow you to monitor events across mainframe alerts such as VTAM sessions and MVS subsystems as well as midrange-computing systems. Netcool/DCMs identify problems before applications and services are affected.

Netcool/Internet Service Monitors™ (ISMs) for managing HTTP and HTTPS web pages and financial transactions help determine the cause of problems affecting eCommerce transactions. Netcool/ISMs measure the availability and performance of Web-based applications and offer Web-based historical reports that can be measured against service agreements. Netcool/ISMs that provide support for SMTP, POP3, and IMAP protocols ensure the availability and response time of email services. Netcool/ISMs also manage the underlying infrastructure protocols, such as DHCP, DNS, FTP, ICMP, NNTP, NTP, TCP Port, and Radius. Netcool/ISMs help ensure the availability of Internet, voice and wireless infrastructures.

The Netcool/Usage Service Monitors™ (USMs) provide usage-metering and show the status of network usage in realtime or over a period of time. These usage monitors measure how many people are using a device and/or service. They also allow you to view the usage for a given department or business unit such as the quantity of hits, or bandwidth usage.

The Netcool/Wireless Service Monitors™ (WSMs) for managing end-to-end availability and performance of WAP and SMS-based services act like a wireless service user to simulate transactions. These Netcool/Service Monitors can test page availability and content accuracy by connecting to defined WAP pages via WAP Gateways.

Netcool/Precision Product Family

The Netcool/Precision product family is built on a flexible architecture designed specifically for modern networks. Utilizing its accurate topology and network connectivity information, Netcool/Precision monitors the network to locate and isolate network problems as they develop and reports these problems to network staff. This enables administrators to resolve problems fast, before they escalate into more serious outages that impact the availability and performance of critical business services.

Netcool/Precision for IP Networks™ (Netcool/PrecisionIP) automatically discovers IP networks, gathering topology data to deliver a complete picture of devices and layer 2 and layer 3 connectivity, including MPLS, ATM and Frame networks. It monitors all discovered elements for status and continually updates its database with new device information as the network changes. When network problems occur, Netcool/PrecisionIP analyzes events and identifies the root cause of the problem—significantly reducing the time it takes to isolate network faults. Fully integrated with the Netcool suite, Netcool/ PrecisionIP delivers a complete picture of network connectivity, and quickly isolates the source of network downtime.

Netcool/Precision for Transmission Networks™ (Netcool/PrecisionTN) automatically discovers transmission layer (Layer 1) networks, deepening the visibility provided by Netcool/Precision IP at network layers 2 and 3. Netcool/Precision TN collects and sends alarm, inventory, facility, and connection information to Netcool/OMNIbus from any TL1- or SNMP-managed NEs so that you can drill down to the very shelf, card, and port involved in the alarm—and all in realtime. This information can be used to visualize the problems with Netcool/Precision TN’s rich web-based GUI or with common reporting tools. And the information is stored in a MySQL or an Oracle database, providing additional opportunities to generate reports and analyze network data.

Like an “engineer in a box,” Netcool/Visionary™ analyzes information from industry-standard SNMP devices and applications and provides real-time, device-centric diagnoses. Its patent-pending MicroCorrelation™ technology analyzes the SNMP Management Information Base information to pinpoint the underlying cause of hundreds of unique problems that pertain to specific devices. Whenever a device such as a server, switch or router shows a deviation from normal behavior, Netcool/Visionary provides an explanation for the condition—showing details on why problems occur and the recommended solution. Netcool/Visionary sends this data to Netcool/OMNIbus.

Netcool/Impact Product Family

Tightly integrated with Netcool/OMNIbus, Netcool/Impact shows the realtime business impact analysis of specific faults within the infrastructure. It allows you to see how Netcool-collected events will impact IT-based business processes, services, and business-critical applications.

Netcool/ Impact retrieves business process, customer and service information from a variety of databases and files. When events occur, Netcool/Impact automatically enriches Netcool/OMNIbus events by linking the right information with each event. This “enriched” event gives you the knowledge needed to define resolution policies and instruct Netcool/Impact to take automatic corrective action on faults. In addition it can escalate events to email, pagers and other systems—ensuring fast and efficient notification. Netcool/Impact’s analysis of events helps you prioritize work and focus on business-critical events.

Netcool/SLA Manager™ delivers realtime service modeling and reporting, allowing you to monitor the impact of IT performance on services and SLAs. From the top down, you can drill into services and view the collection of network and Web devices and server farms supporting them. Its graphical views can be customized to provide a complete picture of business process, IT workflow and faults—calculating how services are performing relative to SLAs historically and in realtime.

Netcool/SLA Manager (Netcool/SLAM) incorporates data across IT components that make up a service, including network devices such as routers and switches, wireless and broadband components, systems and applications. This information is correlated to measure service availability, performance and usage as well as the overall customer experience. By assimilating this information into a broader service model, Netcool/SLAM can show both IT and business executives an ‘at-a-glance’ view of service and application health as well as impending problems.

Netcool/Dashboards Product Family

Netcool/Desktop™ is the proprietary client interface into Netcool/OMNIbus, providing dynamic, intuitive, realtime views of the IT infrastructure. You can toggle easily among list-based, map-based, logical, topological, and graphical views of device-level and service-affecting events. Tools, notifications, and other applications can be launched from within the Netcool Desktop, enabling true, realtime, centralized IT management.

Netcool/Webtop™ is a richly-featured, web-based version of Netcool/Desktop, enabling Netcool views to be configured and accessed across a secure Web interface. In addition to providing “anytime, anywhere” access over any Web-connected PC, Netcool/Webtop can be ported to any other type of web-enabled device, including PDAs and wireless devices. Netcool/Webtop can be configured easily into a wide range of operational and executive views for all types of users.

Netcool/Reporter™ receives event data from the Netcool/OMNIbus™ application and translates it into meaningful reports. By analyzing and presenting data generated over time, Netcool/Reporter provides long-term, retrospective information about the behavior of devices, systems and services. Its drill-down features and access to journals, details, and event histories allows managers to troubleshoot specific problems quickly and effectively. Netcool/Reporter offers an intelligent window into event trends, revealing “hot spots” so you can intervene before larger problems occur. Its easy, intuitive reports enable you to understand the behavior of your infrastructure over time. Designed to help you more effectively manage service and application availability over time, Netcool/Reporter also offers device availability reports, personnel response-time measures, and other statistics to help you report against committed service-level agreements.

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