Data center managers can use SaaS to monitor

Software as a service (SaaS) product such as Salesforce.com and Service-now.com has been an unprecedented success, this trend has also been focused on by data center managers, with the expectation of data center managers requiring only a small portion of upfront funding to reduce their deployment time through this service to lower the base The cost of monitoring and the ability to shorten staff time is a new variant of SaaS: Infrastructure monitoring as a service.

When administrators are using SaaS, all applications are accessed through a web portal, and the payment method is not the same as the traditional upfront payment, most software is to buy a way to pay, SaaS software in addition to an internal component to collect local system data, most of the monthly pay, Because SaaS infrastructure monitoring software follows the same pattern, the data collected is uploaded to the third-party hosting system. Hosted by a third party.

Richard Navarro, the IT head of a San Francisco hospital for the elderly, recently shifted to SaaS based infrastructure monitoring, choosing Accelops's Business Services Management software (BSM).

Navarro said: "We had already installed the monitoring products, when the manufacturer's engineers worked hard for a few weeks to debug the system, and after the purchase of managed Accelops services, I began to use the monitoring system within a few hours, and our staff do not care whether the monitoring system is updated, They can only focus on monitoring results. "

Accelops provides two configurations for its monitoring platform: the traditional internal deployment package as a VMware virtual appliance and a hosted SaaS. The functionality of the SaaS version and the traditional internal deployment version is unchanged, but the SaaS version is more expensive than the traditional internal deployment version, said Scott Gordon, vice president of Accelops Marketing. Accelops's internal deployments and annual subscriptions to SaaS products are priced at $25,000, but at the same price, SaaS versions monitor fewer devices, and SaaS solutions cost at least 30% more than in-house deployments.
But Navarro warns: "There are a lot of hidden costs in internal deployments, and overall, the gap between the two is not obvious."

SaaS-based monitoring without worrying about security issues

"In fact, it's easy to understand the logic of SaaS infrastructure monitoring, and when you start thinking about managing your monitoring, you should make it more meaningful as a service," said Michael Cote, analyst at RedMonk.

Unlike other applications, hosting infrastructure monitoring applications in the cloud does not have as many security and compliance issues.

"Monitoring always requires a little internal deployment component," Cote said. But you can well protect the connection between the data center and the cloud, so this should not be a concern for you, and if the Cloud-based data center is exposed, such as a 6-month CPU Usage chart is not as valuable as it is to be seen.

Navarro, who holds the same view, said: "We are a medical institution, and we have a relatively long way to go, but for a managed service that chooses Accelops, it does not store sensitive information about any company or patient on the server, it has only our infrastructure data, Its security level is not very important.