SoftLayer selects Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS) as the standard monitoring platform for managed hosting customers.

Nimsoft, the provider of Unified Monitoring solutions, today announced that SoftLayer, a provider of hosting and cloud computing solutions, will standardize on the Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS) to offer enhanced infrastructure and application solutions to its managed hosting customers. The company mentions that this will enable SoftLayer customers to benefit from tiered levels of monitoring, according to business needs. It adds that initially, SoftLayer will deploy more than 25,000 systems, with the goal of increasing the performance and availability of hosted business applications.

The company avers that SoftLayer customers receive the same standard-level monitoring, which includes automated alerts and reporting on critical health indicators. It states that NMS APIs feature bi-directional data integration into related IT service management applications, such as configuration management databases and service desks, enabling customers to easily integrate SoftLayer's NMS-based management services into their own IT management environments. The company explains that customers can upgrade to more comprehensive levels of monitoring with database, application and infrastructure service monitoring, and Service Level Agreements (SLAs). NMS tracks SLA agreements against operational and business metrics, and can forecast violations with warning alerts. SoftLayer expects to be fully functional and live with advanced monitoring for all customers in about three months.

It further states that prior to deploying NMS, SoftLayer had been using open source tools that did not provide the enterprise-oriented feature set that SoftLayer expected and customers demanded. NMS offers full transparency from all elements within the infrastructure, through any application stack.

"The ability to provide customers with full visibility into the cloud is an important competitive advantage for service providers like SoftLayer," said Gary Read, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Nimsoft Business Unit at CA Technologies. "SoftLayer's decision to standardize on Nimsoft underscores our leadership in providing these essential Unified Monitoring solutions for the rapidly growing cloud market."

"What differentiates SoftLayer is our ability to provide not only the management tools to control a company's hosted infrastructure, but also the intelligence to make informed decisions about that managed infrastructure," said Sam Fleitman, SoftLayer Chief Operations Officer. "NMS offers a robust reporting tool, which enables us to adapt to nearly any customer environment and provide detailed metrics with efficient, easy to understand reports. Additionally, full API access allows us to seamlessly integrate NMS into our automated deployment and operations process and quickly scale to tens of thousands of servers."