If you know your IT health could be performing better, NetGain’s IT Health Audit is designed for you:

• Identify faults and performance bottlenecks in your IT environment
• Receive clear guidance on how you can optimize to succeed

Our IT Health Audit will provide you with a detailed service report, featuring analysis, as well as recommendations, using our cutting-edge IT monitoring service – Enterprise Manager 6.0 – for this unique two week analysis!

When was the last time you did a thorough assessment of your IT environment?

Don’t miss this fantastic opportunity for a detailed 14-day insight into your IT environment that will help you optimize your IT infrastructure to be more efficient, effective and easy to manage.

This is a special discounted price SO DON’T MISS THIS CHANCE!

Read more about what we are offering and register today. Be the first 20 customers and receive an additional promotional price! Click here >>>

So don’t delay and get on top of your IT infrastructure today!

Cheers

The NetGain Team

To achieve these goals, we are proud to present NetGain’s flagship product, the NetGain Enterprise Manager 6.0. Key features of this revolutionary production were highlighted and supported with a technical demonstration and training. Partners were taught how to setup, configure and most importantly use the monitoring system to manage their IT infrastructures.

“We could tell our partners how user-friendly and easy-to-use our solution is, but there is no better way of showing than letting them try the monitoring system themselves. They explored, experimented and experienced the complete suite of functionality, from configuring the thresholds to creating business and logical views and more. This hands-on session really allowed our partners to experience how user-friendly and simple our solution is. One partner even claimed that he mastered the monitoring system within a mere 45mins!” said Shaik Hussein, Business Development Manager (Regional), NetGain Systems.

GrandTech, one of NetGain’s Key Partners, expressed that “We are really appreciative for this training session. It has really been an eye opener for all of us to discover how easy IT monitoring can be done as well as the potential of the IT monitoring industry. We are definitely looking forward to the many partner events to come!”

The event was a great success and our partners were simply awed by our features, functions and user-friendliness. Call us, talk to us and experience how we monitor the world!

Cheers

The NetGain Team

“Since MetLife collaborated with NetGain’s IMaaS, our IT team has been relieved from stress greatly. We can now identify roots of problems with ease. Indeed, NetGain has provided us with a peace of mind with its automated notifications and alarm systems. Our manpower needs have been reduced greatly and this has helped us save operational costs. Now, we have a more efficient IT infrastructure.’’

We’d like to share this fantastic case study with you.

About MetLife

MetLife was established on 25 March 2004 in Beijing, China. MetLife’s focus on the high-technology industry and financial services industry has given impetus to industrial innovation in the whole of China, enhancing and sustaining China’s economic growth and development. Through consultant marketing, banking insurance, direct sales marketing, group insurance and etc., MetLife provides personal, health and accident protection plans, and insurance services for consumers in Beijing, Chongqing, Guangdong, Shenzhen, Liaoning and Dalian.

What are the challenges and problems you faced before engaging NetGain’s services?

The growing complexity of our business has surfaced higher risks in our IT infrastructure and networks.  In our online insurance system, for instance, technical glitches that occur in our networks, servers, middlewares, databases and etc. have held up our daily operations directly, causing massive profit and opportunity losses. Secondly, the smoothness of the operations of our customer services systems affects our company’s reputation, as well as the timeliness of our business strategies – whether or not we can deliver our services with accuracy and punctuality.

As our company cannot afford any losses and downtime caused by technical problems, our IT team monitors our IT infrastructure, 24/7, which requires huge manpower. Compounded with the large scale of our company, the problems of monitoring and manpower needs have become even more perplexing. Therefore, we need a solution to solve these problems.

How did NetGain help and serve you?

Through consultation, customization and pilot tests, NetGain has crafted a holistic and complete monitoring solution for our IT operations and maintenance. The solution is based on device view and encompasses the following features: different layers of technology in our IT infrastructure and an all-inclusive, end-to-end, comprehensive monitoring system that offers not only a microscopic monitoring of each and every IT component but also a macroscopic monitoring of the infrastructure as a whole. When malfunctions and faults happen, NetGain’s services can identify exactly what went wrong and the source of the fault.  Moreover, NetGain’s services also came in handy for our engine room. From a micro- to macro-view, the performance of the various layers of technologies are monitored. When faults occur, this system can notify the IT team immediately so that proper damage control can be done.

How have you benefitted from NetGain? Is it your IT team or technology?

As NetGain Enterprise Manager is a plug-and-play hardware, we do not have to install and configure any other operating systems and databases.  NetGain Enterprise Manager is also a breakthrough. It is different from the traditional IT infrastructure management, which is very resource-intensive and contains multiple element divisions.  Instead, it combines a holistic IT architecture management structure with effective blade servers, creating an all-encompassing plug-and-play system. It has effectively reduced and minimized the need to procure other forms of integrated management and implementation, shortened our training cycles, enhanced timesaving, and lowered manpower costs.

To further illustrate my point, I shall use an example of one of its functions: alarm classification. The system comprises a repetitive compression alarm, and alarm filtering mechanism, alarm mapping mechanism, event correlation analysis and a disabled alarm mode, which are all complements to the disaster recovery systems. Once problems surface, this this monitoring tool can help to identify roots of the problems quickly and accurately.

In terms of usage, the cutting edge technology and user-friendliness of NetGain Enterprise Manager has enriched the automation of our IT monitoring and created a centralized and unified monitoring system that promotes a proactive instead of reactive management mindset. Without the need to use multiple management tools, our IT team has been greatly relieved.  Moreover, NetGain Enterprise Manager also generates reports, notifications and statistics to inform us about the performance of our IT infrastructure. This is really very convenient!

Which are the support services by NetGain that have left the deepest impression on you?

I feel that the NetGain team is very friendly and sincere. They treat us as though we are their friends. Communicating with them has never posed any problems. Their timely appearance has also helped us solve many problems! Previously, our boss was not satisfied with the reports and feedback provided by NetGain’s monitoring tool. However upon calling them up, it sent its team of engineers over the very next day. Then, they further customized our system to suit our needs. Their efficiency is indeed commendable!

Will you recommend NetGain to other companies that face similar problems as MetLife?

I do know of many friends who work in companies that deal with operations and maintenance and I have already recommended NetGain to many of them. However, as companies make most of the decisions, I hope that NetGain can come up with even more monitoring tools and services to target clients like us, catering to our individual needs.

I believe that I have not made the wrong decision in collaborating with NetGain as they have displayed professionalism in their products, services, teams as well as problem solving methods. These are also the main reasons and motivations for choosing NetGains.

About NetGain Systems

NetGain Systems delivers the world’s first plug & play IT Infrastructure Monitoring as a Service, which means our customers are proactive rather than reactive. We combine performance, availability, event, and impact management with predictive analytics that detect and reduce time to repair – and we achieve this BEFORE our customers or the services they offer are negatively impacted. Launching our global headquarters in Singapore in 2002, we have since opened offices across Asia Pacific, delivering our highly regarded and award winning IT Infrastructure Monitoring as a Service to more than 200 of the regions’ Fortune 500 companies. Our customers cover all industry sectors, large and small, including Nanyang Technological University, China Mobile, Murphy Oil Corporation, CIMB Group, Mount Alvernia Hospital, amongst others, and we were the infrastructure monitoring partner for the Beijing Summer Olympics 2008 and the Singapore Youth Games 2010. We are proud to deliver a service that is cost-effective, extremely easy-to-use, and grows with our customers as they grow and evolve.

You can learn more about NetGain Systems at www.netgain-systems.com or ‘Like’ us on Facebook NetEzen

For more information on MetLife and its products, you can visit www.metlife.com.

Cheers

The NetGain Team

Key Benefits:

• Enables you to monitor applications and devices not supported out-of-the-box
• Supports Powershell, Unix shell script, VBScript, Perl & Python scripts out-of-the-box
• SQL statements output monitoring
• Graphical User Interface for editing and testing scripts

With the powerful custom script monitoring functionality in NetGain EM, you can now bring in these monitoring scripts or add new scripts under a single management console, very easily and quickly. NetGain EM script monitoring supports Powershell, Unix shell script, VBScript, Perl & Python scripts out-of-the-box. So, you can now manage Windows, Linux, or any other network monitoring scripts that you have been using. In EM v6, there’s an even more powerful DB custom script monitoring to monitor SQL statements outputs, without needed to configure anything on the DB server itself.

NetGain EM provides a Graphical User Interface for editing and testing scripts, thus helping you to avoid the time-consuming task of meddling with configuration files, startup scripts, etc… just to get the custom script working.

Based on the polling interval, NetGain EM executes the script. The output of the custom scripts are monitored and, just like any other preinstalled monitors, you can set thresholds for the script’s output and get alerted through Email⁄ SMS, if it exceeds the specified threshold point or does not match your expectations of a “normal” output. The ability to “Test ” script instantly from the edit screen comes handy when you want to share the scripts across multiple devices. Reports for the attributes configured would be shown as graphs.

Take for example; Company A has an in-house developed Logistics application running on Linux. On a daily basis, administrator would have to manually login to the linux server, executes a pre-defined shell script (e.g. logistics_health.sh), and observe the script output. If he sees output indicating “health=ok” and “request_jobs=”, things are ok. Else, it indicates some abnormal conditions that he needs to investigate further.

Using NetGain EM, and within minutes, the administrator can automate the entire process and gets email/SMS alerts to detect abnormal conditions.

Below configuration screenshot shows how this can be done easily:

* Monitor the custom script, just like any other preinstalled monitor type
* Manage its policies, just like any other preinstalled monitor type
* Generates Email/SMS/Audio/Popup alerts, just like any other preinstalled monitor type
* Report on the history output data, just like any other preinstalled monitor type

Cheers

The NetGain Team

When you consider the diverse set of hardware and software found in any large enterprise today, as well as factoring in the Cloud with a set of virtual services and external suppliers, it complicates the situation even further.

Today’s IT environment leaves many IT professionals asking the same question:
How do I control IT and get a broad view across the entire spectrum of hardware and software inside and outside of my organization?

While looking at a “sea of red,” it is not always obvious which outages or performance problems should be worked on first. For example, it is not easy for level one operators to understand that server1.mycompany.com is a critical component of three different, but equally important, company services – IE: EMail, purchasing, etc – nor is it obvious that server2.mycompany.com is a single node in a cluster of 10 that is equally critical.

The most common complaint we hear from CIOs is this: “I don’t care about the 1000’s of devices in my data center. I care about the 30 services that our IT department is providing to end-users.”

And that is where we step in. NetGain believes “Monitoring from a Business Perspective” is the ideal approach for addressing the rapidly growing manageability issues IT professionals are facing today. By mapping your business processes to show the health of process flow and performance of business services, NetGain Enterprise Manager™ monitors IT from a business perspective, and then drills down into business problems until you can isolate and correlate the technology supporting the business service. We give you insight across the business and highlight the impact it has on what you do.

Key Benefits:

• Have a unified console to show your business health
• Detects business-impacted IT outages early
• Ability to drilldown to the root cause quickly and easily with the business navigation views
• Receive service level email and SMS alerts – i.e. not just at device level
• Automatically generates service level (SLA) reports including availability, downtime durations and failure reasons
• Use historical service availability statistics to streamline and improve your overall IT service quality

A few customers have recently asked us how we can help them solve some of the complicated challenges IT professionals are facing today, which is why we put this blog together. We hope it gives you a little bit more insight into where we sit in the monitoring IT landscape and how we deliver our solution from a business perspective.

Cheers

The NetGain Team

1. There is a large shipping company and its primary function is to ship thousands of packages around the world every day. One of its critical operations is in a large hanger at an airport. Planes and trucks are constantly unloading packages, which need to be sorted and loaded back onto different planes and trucks. There is significant computer automation to move these packages and in turn, these systems need monitoring – because if the IT systems fall over, this shipping company would experience chaos. Therefore, having an end-to-end view of the unloading, sorting and reloading of packages with real-time updates on volume, outages and other metrics, is vital to this business. Some might say an end-to-end view is a very technical view and not BSM, however to this shipping company, shipping packages IS its business. Thus being able to see this piece of the Service is important
2. A large financial organization has hundreds of traders, based in all of the major markets around the world, and it is important all of the trading systems are up and running 24×7, or whenever these traders are online. Network links to the outside world are required for trades to take place, and the traders’ workstations, and how well they are performing, is an important piece in the puzzle. As a result, having an end-to-end view of the complete trading application with up-to-date availability, trading volumes and other metrics, is important so they can see if they are making or losing money

The typical BSM for a company is to set up end-to-end views of the important corporate applications – like email or CRM – but that is not the only example of BSM. Shipping, trading, manufacturing, banking, and more, are endless examples of managing the environment in a manner which aligns IT to the business it is in. When IT leverages the BSM approach, it is ensuring IT professionals are positioned to look at the business critical functions vital to success, and in turn, puts them in a position to provide strategic value to the business and their “customers” – the end-users of IT.

Does your company manage the environment which aligns IT to the business it is in?

Cheers

The NetGain Team

From our perspective, up until recently, IT infrastructure monitoring has followed three models:

1. Buy a comprehensive monitoring framework (IBM, HP, EMC  and BMC), which usually requires a large upfront investment, extended installation time to integrate with the existing components, and high on-going maintenance costs. Typically, these systems are large, cumbersome, and hard to adapt to changing needs e.g. simple tasks such as finding or adding a new device or service to monitor can require a service call. It is not difficult to find organisations locked into a dated system, which is not helping in the day-to-day monitoring operation

2. Download Open Source framework tools, which the in-house IT team adapts to their existing systems. The two major shortcomings with this approach are:

     - In-house changes tend to be cosmetic and do not apply to the core system, which may be not be configurable

     - It relies heavily on the work of employees who may subsequently leave the company

3. Buy an off-the-shelf tool – SolarWinds, What’s Up Gold, Manage Engine, Fluke Networks, eG Innovations, amongst others – but these products, though cheaper in the short-term, generally lack the configurability of the first two options and are often very technology specific. For example, if based on SNMP, it may lack support for other technologies, such as storage, servers, databases and applications. Alternatively, if focused on Microsoft technology, it may not work across a multi-vendor platform

Key Considerations for Assessing an Appropriate Infrastructure Monitoring Solution

• Expense – upfront and on-going
• Flexibility – configurability and scalability
• Usability – ease of support and learning
• Technology – expandable or locked in

Infrastructure monitoring, as managed by most enterprises, has reduced the opportunity for IT teams to add value to the core business of an organisation. For example, in an insurance company, the IT team must support the selling of insurance services, whereas in a hospital, it needs to ensure its IT infrastructure enables doctors, nurses and specialists to deliver the most effective care to patients. There are many more examples to reference, but the point is – most monitoring solutions do not optimize the time available to IT teams to focus on delivering business value – the services that significantly enhance their business.

Infrastructure monitoring is vital but delivering an in-house solution is rarely the most efficient use of an IT team’s time or skills. Infrastructure Monitoring as a Service (IMaaS) is quite likely the best answer to this on-going business challenge.

In our next blog, we will delve down into what some of the IT monitoring solution providers deliver and do a comparison.

Cheers

The NetGain Team

But IT monitoring is so expensive I hear you say? It used to be, very expensive. However things have changed significantly and there are more options available today than ever before, including Infrastructure Monitoring as a Service (IMaaS) – please do download our whitepaper on this topic so you can really understand how this IT monitoring delivery model can help you.

IMaaS constantly monitors your IT assets by utilising intelligent and lightweight agents (or probes) to periodically collect and monitor status and performance information from diverse and complex IT environments – including network devices, servers, databases, applications, and more. The information is validated against pre-defined thresholds or policies to generate notifications about potential breakdowns, which are sent to IT personal, via email, SMS, audio alarms or popup windows.

Let’s look at a few of the benefits…

• Value – the most important part of the IMaaS story is cost and value. By investing in IT monitoring as a Service, the overall IT costs are significantly reduced, which means you can spend limited IT budgets on more strategic assets. It also frees up skilled IT staff to focus on more value-add functions, as the vital yet mundane task of infrastructure monitoring is taken care of in the background. As an IT professional, would you prefer to be focused on solving real business problems? IMaaS frees you up to do just that, and that means more professional satisfaction for you and your IT team
• Customer Trust – when your IT system falls down and causes outages, it creates a lot of customer dissatisfaction. If your system is monitored, issues are identified before they become a problem, and that means a better experience for customers and end-users of IT
• Pro-active – with IMaaS in place, IT teams can be pro-active rather than re-active. Without effective monitoring, even a relatively simple IT environment can become challenging, with a cascade-effect leading to bigger issues – like outages – which costs companies a fortune, not to forget the frustration it causes. IMaaS highlights and captures all of these potential issues long before they become bigger problems, so you can act on them immediately
• Flexibility – IT environments are complex, with most companies deploying best-of-breed, multi-platform solutions. If you are currently deploying vendor-specific monitoring solutions for each platform, or writing complex scripts to monitor IT environments, that is sure to lead to bottlenecks and problems. IMaaS tracks all of your IT infrastructure, giving you a bird’s eye view of your assets, and it is this flexibility that allows you to know exactly what is going on at any moment
• Track and Plan – not only does IMaaS enable you to monitor your entire IT performance, it allows you to plan capacity – people and systems. This is becoming more important as companies go into the Cloud, or adopt a virtualization strategy, but also because business and IT are inextricably linked – one needs the other. With IMaaS, you will have a dashboard providing a complete view of your entire IT system in real-time, AND have historical data so you can plan for the future – which means you have proof for adding new services, employing more IT professionals, all backed up with real-time cost justifications

For SMEs IMaaS is a Win-Win – seriously.

We’d be very happy to speak with you about IMaaS in more detail. So if you’ve had enough of the ad-hoc approach you’ve been forced to take towards IT monitoring, please do give us a call. We’ve got a cost-effective solution that is going to blow your socks off – we promise J

Cheers

The NetGain Team

If you consider major outages in recent memory, think Blackberry, Amazon, and the UK banks - HSBC, NatWest, First Direct and RBS. Or more locally, DBS.

We’re pretty sure in all cases there is a monitoring system in place, so the million dollar question is this – why has it failed to alleviate the pain of the customer?

Let’s talk about something completely different, but with parallels, because it is not just IT that is suffering. It is infrastructure as a whole. The world is advancing so rapidly technologically that many of the core functions are not being upgraded in-line with the advancements taking place. A great local infrastructure example is the Singapore Mass Rail Transit (SMRT) “meltdown” in recent months. Not only has this issue highlighted some fundamental faults in the SMRT, it has also resulted in a public outcry, political embarrassment and job losses.

But let’s look into what happened. The SMRT has undergone massive expansion in recent years, and continues to grow, with new train lines scheduled to open in the coming years. It is a huge investment by the SMRT and will see Singapore connected by rail from one end of the island to the other. However, we suspect the technology and monitoring system previously purchased and deployed are not able to keep up with the progress taking place.

All of the new trains recently purchased by SMRT came from China; however the original trains were from Japan. The trains from China are cheaper and are being used on tracks built by the Japanese. The problem is, the Chinese trains are five tonnes heavier than the original Japanese trains and therefore, the infrastructure is being pushed to its limits to cope with the added burden. Obviously, the monitoring system in place when the SMRT was first built is not able to keep up.

While we at NetGain Systems do not have a solution to solve this challenge, we can see parallels with the IT industry.  

Why? Traditional monitoring “models” – be it for the SMRT or for IT – are purchased, deployed, the staff are trained and then it is handed over to the customer. However, in this new world with things changing so fast, and technology evolving every few years – the old monitoring model no longer makes sense. To ensure you are staying on top of your system, you need access to experts at all times to make sure your monitoring system keeps up with the technology you are implementing. That is why we have launched Infrastructure Monitoring as a Service (IMaaS) – do check out our new whitepaper which goes into more detail on this IT revolution.

It’s as simple as this – to ensure technology keeps up with the times, we’ve got to throw out the old and bring in the new – and that is monitoring delivered as a service. The “old” way does not work anymore. People need access to experts at all times. IMaaS meets the needs of IT professionals today and in the future. It grows and evolves with business. At NetGain Systems, we don’t claim to be able to solve the SMRT problems, but we can solve the banks problems through IMaaS.

Immediate Results Businesses Experience with IMaaS?

• Performance, availability, event, and impact management with predictive analytics that detect and automatically resolve IT performance issues – and this is achieved BEFORE services are negatively impacted
•  All monitoring information available in business ready reports, which means business executives can understand how the IT infrastructure is performing in relation to their line of business
• Pre-emptive monitoring, which acts as a “health screening” tool, to inform IT teams of potential disruptions to IT infrastructure and services
• Know, 24×7, what is happening across your entire IT infrastructure, which includes availability and performance of network devices, servers, systems, databases, middleware, application services and customized applications
• Customizable frameworks and interfaces, because customization is typically required to some extent
• Monitor back-end devices – physical or virtual – and scale for a distributed regional or global network

When experiencing your next outage, ask yourself – is it time we finally upgraded to Infrastructure Monitoring as a Service – a cheaper and more effective monitoring solution in today’s rapidly changing world? Or better yet, perhaps we need to consider finding a great service provider now, before we lose millions of dollars and customers when our next outage occurs?

And just in case you need more evidence to convince your boss – check out this Information Week article from 2011 on the cost of downtime – $26.5 billion. Or more on the disaster Sony experienced last year – no one quite knows the cost of that fiasco.

You can’t say we’re not looking out for you.

Cheers

The NetGain Team

Download this important whitepaper now!

Infrastructure monitoring is not ‘exciting,’ but it is one of the most important priorities an organisation has to factor in to ensure it is delivering effective IT services to internal and external users. Technology has evolved at a rapid pace in the past two decades, and yet IT monitoring has not evolved in line with this growth. In fact, the majority of enterprises have taken an ad-hoc approach to infrastructure monitoring, which has resulted in inefficient systems and frustrated IT professionals. Essentially, how it has been done is not best practise.

When the strategic decision is made to subscribe to Infrastructure Monitoring as a Service (IMaaS), IT professionals are liberated and able to work more strategically with IT assets.

IMaaS is a Winning Strategy

• End-customers experience seamless interaction and superior levels of service with your business
• Internal end-users expect IT efficiency and for it to “just work”
• IT professionals win because their “customers” are happier, they are reassured their IT systems will be running 24×7, they can be pro-active, they can deliver value, and they no longer have to focus on the mundane job of infrastructure monitoring

Please download this important whitepaper now (“Infrastructure Monitoring as a Service (IMaaS) Explained – a Whitepaper and Discussion on an IT Revolution that is Changing the Way Enterprises Monitor IT Infrastructure”) to understand the monitoring revolution taking place.

Topics discussed in this whitepaper include:

1. Where infrastructure monitoring is today and the challenges
2. Why IMaaS is the future
3. The ease of deploying IMaaS
4. The business benefits of IMaaS
5. How your IT team benefits from IMaaS
6. Moving from CAPEX to OPEX
7. Where to go from here?
8. And a customer success story from Panasonic

We are pleased to share this highly relevant and extremely valuable information with you.

Cheers

The NetGain Team