eG Innovations announces eG Enterprise v6

Bala Murugan Vaidhinathan, CTO, and Holger Schulze, VP of Marketing, at eG Innovations, reached out to introduce me to the newest release of the company's IT infrastructure monitoring product. This version is all about improving usability and the product's ability to monitor cloud computing environments.

What's new in eG Enterprise v6

Here's what eG Innovations has to say about what's new in this version of eG Enterprise:

• One-view dashboards — With the one-view dashboards, administrators do not have to traverse multiple screens or tools. They can now get a simplified, aggregated overview of IT services through a single dashboard. Executives can view service demand and popularity, while IT managers can get a quick overview of the key service performance metrics. Service demand, resource consumption and service quality are all presented in the same dashboard so IT managers can make intelligent decisions and preempt issues that can impact the user experience.
• Next-gen user interface — Version 6 delivers a modern Web 2.0 interface providing enhanced ease of use, accessibility and personalization of the management console. This seamless interface allows administrators to manage their entire IT environment, whether it utilizes physical or virtual servers and private, hybrid or public clouds.
• eG mobile app — Version 6 introduces a mobile app for iOS and Android devices. Administrators can now track the performance of their key IT services from anywhere, at any time using their mobile and tablet.
• AnyCloud technology — The product now delivers a consolidated way to manage IT infrastructure, applications and users irrespective of the means and location of the delivery. The universal agent architecture and one-view dashboard provide a unified platform to manage a myriad set of cloud based services and technologies.
• VDI console for end-user self-service — Version 6 adds a VDI-based console. VDI administrators can configure and publish a console with virtual desktop session usage and performance metrics. This console empowers end-users, providing them the ability to perform basic diagnosis to determine what may be causing a slowdown during virtual desktop access – e.g., their network connectivity, bandwidth usage within their session, system resources used by the session, etc. This self-service console helps reduce user complaints to the help desk and thereby reduces support costs and enhances IT productivity.
• Enhanced desktop and server virtualization monitoring — eG Enterprise includes enhanced Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V monitoring capabilities. V6 also extends eG Enterprise’s patented In-N-Out monitoring technology for servers using the Linux KVM hypervisor. For application virtualization and virtual desktop environments, eG Enterprise now includes powerful, new browser monitoring capabilities. Deeper visibility into user logons release to allow administrators to quickly identify and solve slow login issues is also part of the enhancements in this release.

Snapshot analysis

There are many suppliers focused on performance monitoring and management. Each of them is looking at different aspects of performance management and monitoring. Some focus on the end-user's experience. Some focus on database, application or system performance. Some focus on the performance of the network itself.

Their approaches, too, are different. Some ask customers to embed hardware or software agents throughout the IT infrastructure. Others "sniff" the network and learn what is talking with what. Still others connect to the management interfaces of all of the operating systems, application components, applications, databases, networking and storage equipment.

In the end, the goal is usually the same. All of them would point out that performance problems can lead directly to both lost customers and lost revenues. eG Innovations says that when time is money, it is important to be able to quickly see what is happening, where it is happening and be able to either prevent problems from occurring or to address them.

The company has long been able to monitor end-to-end connectivity and delve deeply into the services that make up today's distributed applications. The new user interface and the ability to take monitoring on the road using either mobile devices or virtual desktops can bring the benefits of performance monitoring to many different entities within an organization.

While their customers typically say good things about eG Innovations and its products, the company faces very strong competition from large and small suppliers. The biggest competitors, such as BMC, CA, HP, IBM and Microsoft would point out that their tools make it easy to monitor their own computing environments. Smaller competitors are pushing "big data" and "predictive analytics" as part of their claim of superiority. To win, eG Innovations has to be able to address all of these counter claims and do them one better in both overall product capability and ease of use.

Can the company win? That's the big question. One thing that's clear is that the company is constantly pushing the capabilities of its eG Enterprise by improving its data collection, data analysis and its ability to tease out useful performance information from an ever-growing pile of operational data IT infrastructure produces. eG Enterprise v6 is certainly worth a look.