I’ve been following Netuitive for over two years now. You can do a search for them on my blog and see all of the various activities and how they’ve evolved over the years. I was very skeptical of their early claims such as “BSM by Lunch” which I’m glad they’ve now backed away from to focus on their core competencies and value add to the overall BSM solution stack. I wish they would have stuck with the blog they started at BSM Digest, but I understand the challenges.

The power of getting accurate, trusted events free from false positives and false negatives is CRITICAL to the underpinning of any good BSM solution. If you’re putting garbage on the dashboards of your tools that operations, support and executives have to see, you’re NOT going to be successful with your BSM strategy. I’m also now very interested in Integrien and ProactiveNet (BMC) and look forward to digging in deeper into their solutions. Nearly every client I’ve seen and even when I ran the monitoring tools group at EarthLink we all have the same problems that these vendors are addressing. They’re the ONLY ones filling these gaps as best I can tell.

I’m looking for a really good discussion on Netuitive’s Active Behavior Profile (ABP). Which of your nine patents apply to this concept. Does every managed element type have a unique ABP or does every actual component have their own ABP? If I want to model/manage a Windows 2000 server different from a Windows 2003 server, how does this work? Is this where Templates come into play. What data streams are “mashed up” in the ABP? Templates?

What vendors do you play best with? Where are the key details of how/what you leverage from each of these vendor solutions? Please share some details. If a client only has the out of the box hardware and OS monitoring using their vendor’s solution with out of the box configurations, what can I expect to see in SI? What will I be missing? Do you recommend certain things be turned on to get health, workload and other outputs? Please discuss. Is one vendor’s CPU or Memory treated the same as another vendors?

When Trusted Alarms are sent outbound towards an event management solution as SNMP Traps, do they include group and function information? What can be mapped into varbinds? How is the trap constructed? Where does this happen?

I’d love to see some hard tangible ROI discussed on how these products are helping. I’m also very interested to know if the typical reactive based operations and support organizations are ready to get more proactive based on what these three vendors can provide. Can they mature from the comfortable, reactive “it’s broke” world and operate in a proactive, predictive “it’s a problem in this area, trust me” world?

Look forward to the discussion!

Aternity and StackSafe were very highly ranked by Joshua Jaffe over at TechConfidential.

Aternity looks very interesting and would be a key component in a maturing Business Service Management (BSM) solution. They have a webinar upcoming that I plan to attend to see what else I can learn. I know they follow the blogosphere, so maybe they can chime in with some technical, non-marketing information on their solution, capabilities and how they see their solution enabling BSM.

StackSafe has some interesting stuff from what I can tell from reviewing their website. Their technology seems to be firmly rooted in the dev, test, QA world and all things before something is put into production. Change management, what if testing, etc. I could easily see this stuff as another approach for a dev-test lab for the monitoring tools group to leverage. I’d position this as a way for the typical EMS/NMS team have their own virtual labs and business service or application copies that they can instrument using their normal tools, test scenarios, events, metrics collection, etc. StackSafe, if you’re out there, would be interested in talking about how we could do something like this at DevCampTivoli.