25 Reasons to Choose Nimsoft Over Others...

Nimsoft equips MSPs with the broadest and deepest IT monitoring solution set.  As a result, with NimBUS, MSPs can expand outside of the small business market—which has become characterized by commoditization and deteriorating margins—and instead target mid to large enterprise clients who present more heterogeneous, service-demanding, margin-enhancing business opportunities.

Other tool vendor solutions who primarily offer Windows or Linux-centric monitoring solutions limit MSPs to an increasingly competitive, price-sensitive SMB market.

Nimsoft’s advanced IT monitoring solution makes it possible for accomplished MSPs to resell their managed service offerings to other MSPs, and so dramatically expand their revenue opportunities.

MSPs often install NimBUS software in their own facilities. This local installation gives the MSP full control, flexibility, and creativity in solution deployment and business opportunity. Today, a number of Nimsoft MSPs are reselling their ‘Powered-by-NimBUS’ managed service offerings to partner MSPs, companies that can then resell services under their own branding—without having to invest in the infrastructure required to offer these services on their own.  For the proven MSP, this channel-based approach offers significant additional revenue potential.

Other monitoring tools providers, who typically deliver their solution via a hosted model, limit the way MSPs can leverage their monitoring tool investment.  MSPs who buy into a tool vendor’s hosted solution may not have the necessary control over the monitoring application and infrastructure to enable effective reselling to other MSPs.

Most other monitoring tool vendors selling into the MSP market fall extremely short of the broad range of IT coverage Nimsoft provides. Nimsoft offers support for networks, servers, database, applications, and much more.  Nimsoft's broader technology coverage translates into significantly larger client and revenue opportunities.

Most other tool vendors only offer Windows-based server support, with fewer vendors offering limited Linux support, and fewer yet (if any) offering UNIX, Netware, and iSeries AS400 support.  Nimsoft offers strong support for Windows, Linux, UNIX, Novell, AS400, and also VMware virtual server technology.  This heterogeneous server support means MSPs can capitalize on more revenue opportunities—both through deeper account penetration and support for more prospective clients.  Also, compared to other monitoring tool vendor solutions, Nimsoft offers a greater degree and depth of server monitoring—for example in the number of server metrics monitored out of the box.  Nimsoft offers extremely deep monitoring for all supported server platforms, which enables MSPs to meet the needs of clients who demand more intensive scrutiny of their business critical servers.

Similarly, Nimsoft’s network support is much more comprehensive than alternatives, both in terms of breadth and depth of network monitoring and analysis offered.  For example for Cisco networks, Nimsoft offers IPSLA support, which makes it possible for the MSP to ensure high network availability and performance by monitoring network jitter, response time, and packet loss (among other performance measurements) across the client’s critical network segments.  This IPSLA support is especially important for MSPs who offer, or are planning to offer, VoIP monitoring services.

Database monitoring support from other tool vendors is also extremely limited compared to Nimsoft.  Most vendors offer support for only Microsoft SQL Server. Further, their support for this platform is extremely light, covering very few health checks and metrics out of the box.  Nimsoft provides comprehensive monitoring for Sybase ASE, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, IBM Informix, and IBM DB2. In addition, support for MySQL is currently available in beta release.

Alternative application monitoring solutions are also severely limited when compared to Nimsoft.  Most other monitoring tool vendors primarily support Microsoft-based applications such as Exchange, IIS, and Active Directory, and possibly some light support for applications like Lotus Notes and Citrix.  Nimsoft offers deeper support for these applications, plus popular Web Application Server platforms such as JBoss, WebSphere, Weblogic, Apache, Tomcat, and Sybase EA Server.  Further, Nimsoft’s MSP partners can easily adapt NimBUS to monitor their client's home-grown business applications—a difficult task for other vendor’s solutions.  Nimsoft offers a unique combination of server-side monitoring and end-user response time monitoring, providing a complete, end-to-end monitoring picture.  With Nimsoft, MSPs can deliver new, end-to-end application monitoring services that boost margins and that represent a significant differentiator in the marketplace.

The Nimsoft development team has been building successful monitoring solutions since 1984.  Our current IT availability and performance monitoring product, NimBUS, is a fourth generation solution whose first line of code was written over 10 years ago.  Nimsoft’s decades of experience show in our product’s sophistication and broad-ranging IT infrastructure coverage—featuring support for networks, multiple server platforms, databases, applications, end-user monitoring, non-IT technologies, and much more.

Other tool vendors selling into the MSP market have development tenures that are a small fraction of Nimsoft’s. As a result, these vendors’ solutions typically lack the richness, the range of monitoring functionality, and the enterprise-class scalability found in NimBUS.  Side-by-side product comparisons are encouraged to validate this point.

Some other monitoring tool vendors provide a lengthy listing of IT infrastructure devices and applications that can be monitored. However, these products typically lack the depth of monitoring required to ensure client’s IT systems, networks, and business applications are operating at peak performance. Usually, these products only support very few health checks out of the box.

For each technology, application, platform, and device that Nimsoft products monitor, a comprehensive array of metrics are collected and analyzed. This added depth allows MSPs to provide much more proactive and preemptive monitoring services for their clients, ensuring committed service levels are met and contracts remain in tact.

170 of the world’s largest MSP and Hosting Providers rely on Nimsoft to deliver the high scalability required.  With Nimsoft, MSPs and Hosting Providers get the monitoring scalability they need to serve more clients with existing staff, serve larger clients, and monitor more devices and simultaneous events. Nimsoft’s solutions feature an efficient, high performance event processing engine that can scale to support event volumes generated from tens of thousands of servers. Plus, it offers a secure, reliable, and efficient client access model that can support hundreds of concurrent connections.

Solutions from most other monitoring tool vendors are limited in their scalability, and are primarily architected to serve SMB clients with IT environments of less than 99 seats.

The NimBUS solution for MSPs comes with a service delivery portal that MSPs can brand as their own and enables multiple clients to login access report content specific to their account. For each client, the portal contains dynamic and custom dashboards, dynamic and custom performance reports, and custom SLA compliance reports.  Additionally a full-function operator's alarm display is included that can be made to be read only for guest logins.

Other tool vendor’s solutions offer client reporting that is limited to prepackaged health status content—with no custom dashboards, no custom performance reports, and no SLA reports available.

Nimsoft’s core alarm and event processing engine is enterprise class, meaning it can contend with the hundreds of thousands of events that are generated from huge client deployments.  Recently Gartner acknowledged Nimsoft as a viable alternative to such vendors as IBM, CA, HP, and BMC in the Event Correlation and Analysis Magic Quadrant.  Nimsoft offers a highly scalable event processing platform that can handle tens of thousands of events in real time.  The NimBUS Alarm Server (NAS), a component of the core NimBUS server software, is our central event filtering, correlation, automation, notification, and escalation engine.  A point-and-click GUI facilitates the definition of custom automation routines.

Products from other monitoring tool vendors have event management functionality that is severely limited in its event handling automation and sophistication.

Deployment of Nimsoft across the MSP's own infrastructure and across a widely distributed client infrastructure is a drag-and-drop and point-and-click exercise.

Other vendor’s solutions offer similar ease of configuration and deployment.

Nimsoft offers comprehensive support for Cisco VoIP, including support for Cisco Unified Communications Manager and both current and prior releases of Cisco CallManager and Cisco Unity.  Furthermore, Nimsoft support for Cisco UCM is complemented by our robust network monitoring, specifically support for Cisco IPSLA which monitors jitter, packet loss, and response time across key network segments that support VoIP traffic.  VoIP infrastructure status information is easily displayed in Nimsoft dashboards, performance reports, and SLA reports.

Other monitoring tool vendors offer little to no support for VoIP environments.

With its service level management (SLM) architecture and capabilities, Nimsoft supports MSPs who are adopting ITIL to improve their own service delivery and support operations.  Equally important, Nimsoft SLM capabilities also allow MSPs to demonstrate ITIL knowledge and alignment with enterprise clients who demand ITIL-oriented services.  Even enterprise clients that have not deployed ITIL in the past will often embrace ITIL when their MSPs position it as key for optimal service infrastructure availability and performance.

To deliver ITIL-based services, MSPs require a sophisticated, scalable, SLA-based monitoring solution such as NimBUS. Only NimBUS offers coverage of the client’s full end-to-end IT infrastructure and monitors it in a service-centric fashion.  Most other monitoring tools from vendors in the MSP market lack the key characteristics required to function in an ITIL-centric capacity.

Products from Nimsoft and most other monitoring tool vendors who have a strong MSP focus can be integrated equally well with incumbent MSP toolsets.

Like most alternative solutions, Nimsoft’s product architecture enables secure communications between MSPs and clients, without the use of VPNs. However, with its TCP/IP based publish-subscribe message bus, Nimsoft’s architecture goes steps beyond these alternatives to deliver improved data transport efficiency and reliability.  Furthermore, Nimsoft’s architecture provides a range of high availability (HA) configuration options at each tier of an n-tiered deployment. 

Nimsoft’s HA architecture ensures no data is lost as it is collected and transported from the client’s environment through to the MSP's central facility.  Additionally, Nimsoft’s architecture allows for configuring as many deployment tiers as necessary (i.e. to support clients who have central and multiple branch offices) with no compromise in the reliability of MSP-to-client communications.

Other tool vendors put MSPs in a precarious situation as their solutions are primarily built upon unreliable, SNMP-based data collection and transport mechanisms that offer limited HA options.

Nimsoft comes equipped with a sophisticated SLA monitoring and reporting engine that can be used to proactively monitor client's managed environments against agreed upon service level objectives.  Nimsoft SLA monitoring predicts violations in SLA commitments and alerts the MSP well in advance of a breach so that violations can be preempted.  Nimsoft SLA reporting provides historical perspectives and compliance trend analysis so that MSPs can track their progressive improvement in service delivery quality. Nimsoft SLA reports are Web based and are easily accessed by clients to demonstrate MSPs service delivery commitments and value.

Most other monitoring tool vendors can’t offer the sophisticated level SLA monitoring that Nimsoft provides

Nimsoft’s custom dashboard functionality is another key attraction for MSP.  With Nimsoft, MSPs differentiate themselves by providing unique dashboard views containing health status metrics that offer greater appeal and demonstrate greater value for clients.

Other tools vendor’s reports offer constrained, aesthetically unappealing views, and are limited in the health status indicators they can provide, which limits the value MSPs are able to demonstrate to their clients.

Nimsoft provides a full array of end-user transaction response time solutions for client's business applications and Web services.  MSPs can differentiate themselves from competitive MSPs by demonstrating greater value through monitoring of end-user’s application transaction response times.

Other monitoring tool vendors do not provide response time monitoring for client's business applications and Web-based services.

Nimsoft provides robust monitoring for the VMware virtualization investments of MSPs and their clients.  With virtualization being a popular movement in the IT arena, it is critical for the MSP to be outfitted with a tool that provides comprehensive monitoring in this area.

Other monitoring tool vendors do not offer monitoring for virtual server environments.

Most other monitoring tools, especially those based on a hosted model, are not well suited to the needs of Hosting Providers and MSPs, firms that often have significant hosted server environments. Furthermore, many MSPs are moving to build their hosted environments on virtual platforms such as VMware.  Alternative tool vendors are far behind Nimsoft in their support for virtual server environments.

Nimsoft’s solutions have been proven at the world’s largest Hosting Providers (Rackspace for example) and they have been proven to scale and monitor up to 100,000 servers from a single NimBUS Server domain.

Only Nimsoft offers complete flexibility for doing custom development of monitors and probes. Nimsoft offers a software developer kit and open APIs—features many of Nimsoft's MSP customers have leveraged to build custom solutions for their client's unique monitoring needs.

Other tools vendor offer limited customization capabilities.

Nimsoft is extremely flexible in its customization and product configuration. NimBUS’ ability to fit within an MSP’s preferred service delivery and support processes is a key attraction for many MSPs.  NimBUS probes are easily configured to collect the data necessary to ensure high availability and peak performance of client's unique infrastructure and business applications.

Nimsoft dashboards are highly customizable so MSPs can see their client's health status in the way that fits best with the existing support model. In addition, the MSP can craft custom dashboards that can be served out to each client to better demonstrate the MSP’s value.

Nimsoft is not limited in its monitoring—offering a breadth of  prepackaged solutions for servers, applications, networks, and much more.  Plus, NimBUS enables MSPs to quickly and easily adapt their services to client's unique business infrastructure and applications.

Other monitoring tool vendors limit the MSP to only a subset of most clients’ heterogeneous environments. Many solutions only provide limited monitoring of Windows servers and a few Microsoft applications. These product limitations prohibit MSPs from meeting many of the unique client requirements that Nimsoft addresses.

Nimsoft provides a unique ability to extend its monitoring to data points outside of typical IT infrastructure and application components.  Nimsoft can easily target any business database and query business data, such as parts inventory metrics, number of sales transactions, and more.  This business-centric data collection and monitoring allows MSPs to offer higher-value, higher-margin services to their clients.

Other monitoring tool vendors are limited to IT infrastructure components and application data.

Nimsoft’s large array of monitoring probes ensures that data, regardless of where it resides, is accessible for collection, analysis, and reporting.  This includes non-traditional devices such as environmental systems (heating/AC units, UPS, generators, etc.) that may be SNMP enabled or offer some other means for making their syslogs available for interrogation.  With Nimsoft, MSPs can extend their managed service offerings to include all important technologies within their client's environment—yet another way to provide added value for clients.

Nimsoft is designed for monitoring service levels by providing the ability to aggregate and monitor all the infrastructure components that support clients’ business applications. Nimsoft's Service Level Manager application can monitor all relevant technologies and services against SLA metrics with real-time compliance monitoring and forecasting.

Other monitoring tool vendors do not provide SLA monitoring and reporting capabilities.

Nimsoft does not require MSPs to pay large upfront costs; pricing is based on a monthly subscription, making it an ideal fit for each MSP’s business growth strategy.

Other monitoring tool vendors typically require fixed and somewhat sizeable upfront payments; actual prices are usually dependent upon size of the client environment being monitored.