Netuitive integrates VMware into monitoring tools

Netuitive plans to detail on Monday the latest version of its Netuitive SI, which can now operate in VMware infrastructures.

"We've fully integrated all our virtualization monitoring into our core SI product, and we've added support for clusters and the datastore," said Daniel Heimlich, a vice president at Netuitive.

[ Read Test Center's guide: "Virtualization for the rest of us." ]

The new support for clusters enables users to monitor and analyze them as a single entity and brings failover and load-balancing. The SI product, he added, "self-learns the behavior of all infrastructure resources."

The sum of the enhancements enables what the company refers to as a Total Health Index, or a snapshot of the health of a virtual infrastructure. From there, Heimlich explains, companies can drill down into virtual machines and get application data from out-of-the-box tools, such as Tivoli, Microsoft's Operations Manager, HP OpenView, and BMC Patrol.

"We show a correlated composite view of the infrastructure," Heimlich said.

Netuitive's approach appeals to IT shops because most of those tools Netuitive works with were built for distributed computing, not virtual architectures, according to David Williams, research vice president at Gartner.

"It's about optimizing your current infrastructure," Williams said. "Netutive gives an overview and visibility into data IT might then use to reprovision."

Williams added, however, that customers have to be mature enough, from an infrastructure perspective, to manage in such a holistic manner. That said, Netuitive SI might be a natural fit for companies with cloud or service-oriented infrastructures because they already think this way, while more traditional infrastructures would require an adjustment to make the most of the tool.