IMPACT BRIEF | 1 ©2013 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com

AbstractEnsuring infrastructure performance and availability with a keen eye to the delivery of critical business services is not a new challenge. But internal and external cloud, ecosystem-wide interdependencies, more savvy and impatient IT consumers, and the vastly accelerated rate of change that many IT organizations are currently facing, make this challenge as new and relevant as ever.

This ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) impact brief looks at ManageEngine’s newest version of OpManager, first introduced in June of 2013, which EMA believes is a compelling answer to this age-old, but newly urgent set of requirements. Included is an interview with one OpManager deployment for added dimension and insight.

EventOn June 20, 2013, ManageEngine introduced its next version of OpManager with unique enhancements targeted at improved scalability, data center visualization, application performance and CMDB integration, and an enhanced capability for visualizing events across domains. The announcements herald ManageEngine’s continued growth and expansion into larger enterprise environments, while maintaining attractive price points and ease of deployability and administration that allow it to sustain its popularity among mid-tier and lower-end enterprise customers.

OpManager is a platform for monitoring networked infrastructures with support for SNMP trap, network traffic analysis, syslogs, and other sources. It can monitor not only routers and switches, but also Windows, Unix and AIX servers, virtual servers (VMware and Hyper-V), load balancers, firewalls, printers, racks and other devices, MS SQL, and also Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, and core application services and processes. OpManager can monitor VoIP performance for lifecycle support from pre-deployment testing through production-level troubleshooting. Moreover, OpManager can help to automate network change and configuration management with policy enforcement for best practices.

June Enhancements in More Depth• OpManagerEnterprisePlusEdition:The June announcement introduced an EnterprisePlusEdition

of OpManager, for very large enterprises and service providers – with a need to reach out to up to 50,000 devices and one million interfaces from a single probe. The EnterprisePlusEdition is currently in beta, but priced at or below the $1 million mark in support of ManageEngine’s claim to “carrier-grade scalability at commodity prices.” ManageEngine also offers two other editions for OpManager:

◦ OpManagerEssentialEditionfor small/medium enterprises with fewer than 500 devices and 10,000 interfaces. It is widely deployed across what ManageEngine estimates as 10,000 customers.

◦ OpManagerEnterpriseEditionfor larger enterprises with up to 5,000 devices and 50,000 interfaces. It is currently in deployment across more than 200 customer environments. EnterpriseEdition starts at $16,495 for 500 devices.

ManageEngine Broadens Both Value and Enterprise Outreach with 2013 OpManager Enhancements

The announcements herald ManageEngine’s continued growth and expansion into

larger enterprise environments, while maintaining its popularity

among mid-tier and lower-end enterprise customers.

IMPACT BRIEF | 2 ©2013 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com

• EnhancedPollingandDiscovery:To do this, ManageEngine had to significantly improve its capabilities for polling and discovery, with support for up to 500 polls per second and a faster discovery engine that ManageEngine is continuing to enhance. It is also leveraging a highly scalable user interface built over JavaScript (Ember js).

• IntegrationwithManageEngineApplicationsManager:The new plug-in integration with ManageEngine Applications Manager will significantly extend its reach in providing a unified view of the application and the infrastructure with its native support for more than 50 applications spanning physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures. Applications Managerin combination with ManageEngine Site 24X7was a “Value Leader” in EMARadar™ forAdvancedPerformanceAnalyticsRadar:Q42012and a “Strong Value” in technical performance management and change impact and capacity optimization.

• Integration with the ManageEngine CMDB:This complements OpManager’s existing strengths in automating change management across the network with a plug-in that can enable automatic updates to assets referenced in the CMDB as well as added support for managing the change process approvals through change advisory boards or other change-management-related teams. EMA research in EcosystemCloud:ManagingandOptimizingCloudServicesAcrosstheFullCloudMosaic(Q2 2013)showed that those IT organizations with effective CMDB deployments were dramatically more likely to be effective in adopting internal and external cloud-delivered business services.

• New3-DDatacenterBuilder:This compelling new feature reflects ManageEngine’s budding support for facilities and Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM). Currently this capability is primarily directed at providing good visualization of the data center for monitoring purposes. But future directions should include growing more robust support for power monitoring, capacity planning and infrastructure optimization across the data center.

• 360°RootCauseAnalysisGraph:This is an event-produced graph that allows for a consolidated view of changing conditions across domains. Over time, ManageEngine plans to add increased investments in correlation and analytics.

An Interview with a Global Manufacturing Using OpManager Enterprise EditionIn July of 2013 EMA spoke with a company that had deployed OpManager, Enterprise Edition deployment, to get added insight into OpManager’s current capabilities and values prior to the introduction of Enterprise Plus. The company is a $12 billion manufacturing enterprise with $1 million per hour downtime. As such it provides a compelling foundation for looking at the coming enhancements announced above.

Q: Could you describe your role and your IT organization? “I wear several hats and have the title of Senior Engineer of IT, but I am more of an analyst for my IT organization, responsible for incident management, change management and root cause analysis across our monitoring services. We have two main data centers and a dozen or so smaller facilities, with outreach to about 80,000 device interfaces including both network and systems. We support three manufacturing centers globally.”

Q: Could you describe how you’re currently working with the OpManager Enterprise Edition? “We have been using OpManager for core red-light-green-light monitoring across our global IT infrastructure. As such, it complements other solutions such as ManageEngine’s Applications Manager,

In July of 2013, EMA spoke with a company, a $12 billion

manufacturing enterprise with $1 million per hour

downtime, that had deployed OpManager, Enterprise Edition.

IMPACT BRIEF | 3 ©2013 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com

Nagios, vSphere, to name a few. Right now we are testing out the ManageEngine OpManager in version 10.1. We have one central ManageEngine console and six probes. We are testing the latest version, running very frequent polls – about 130 per second spread across 5,000 devices.”

Q: Who are the stakeholders currently using OpManager?“Current stakeholders include our Service Desk Manager, Windows, Unix and database engineers, as well as our principal network engineers, along with the operations team more broadly. The network engineers, in particular, are finding value in looking additional performance data, such as port performance and utilization, for trending and planning.”

Q: What benefits have you achieved from working with OpManager?“The usability is definitely there. It’s very user friendly. And the functionality is also right in line with what we need, even given the demands of our large, complex enterprise environment, where we’re raising the bar and pushing the limits for scalability for OpManager Enterprise. And the cost is reasonable as well—making it very competitive from a cost/value perspective. Also, ManageEngine support provides excellent support. At one point in a revision I wondered I was their only customer, because they seemed to be addressing everything I requested.”

EMA PerspectiveManageEngine will be challenging many in the industry with its new OpManager capabilities – in terms of both scalability and function, especially as some of the advances continue to mature. The commitment to a reasonably priced, cross-domain solution with strong hooks into application performance, configuration and change management, and data center monitoring should place ManageEngine in the catbird’s seat when mid-tier and larger enterprises stumble over a morass of expensive, poorly integrated and complex tools.

As with all solutions, the “journey” is still not complete. For instance, ManageEngine is still improving its API support so that both the CMDB and Applications Manager integrations can be more effectively implemented in the same console at the same time. But EMA has spoken with a number of ManageEngine customers over the last few years and has consistently been impressed with the company’s progressive approach to traditionally costly and often unwieldy management problems. The new editions of OpManager certainly reflect that broader trend as ManageEngine continues to evolve its portfolio to satisfy very large as well as mid-tier and smaller enterprises.

About EMA Founded in 1996, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is a leading industry analyst firm that provides deep insight across the full spectrum of IT and data management technologies. EMA analysts leverage a unique combination of practical experience, insight into industry best practices, and in-depth knowledge of current and planned vendor solutions to help its clients achieve their goals. Learn more about EMA research, analysis, and consulting services for enterprise line of business users, IT professionals and IT vendors at www.enterprisemanagement.com or blogs.enterprisemanagement.com. You can also follow EMA on Twitter or Facebook. 2711.071813

EMA has spoken with a number of ManageEngine customers

over the last few years and has consistently been impressed

with the company’s progressive approach to traditionally

costly and often unwieldy management problems.