Many, many books have been written about service level management, but our experience shows that very few organizations actually define and report on service levels for their IT services. Typically this is because of the complexity of setting them up and maintaining them, and also the manual overhead of reporting on service levels on a regular basis.

The NimBUS product suite simplifies this process by providing easy to use GUIs to define service levels and by making the reporting process completely automated. If you are a service provider, each customer can be provided with their own "portal", just seeing how their particular services are performing. If you are an internal IT organization, this information can be published to an internal intranet server.

Once configured NimBUS will start generating reports. It will generate a new SLM report every hour, although you can change that period to your own specifications. Once the report is generated, we can go back into our SLM definition and it will show us trending information (i.e. are we trending towards a breach in the future) and will also show us the historical information for this service level. The reports can be viewed either through your internal web server, from the FTP site you sent them to or within the product itself.

The architecture of NimBUS allows for an extremely efficient monitoring solution that provides for end-to-end service level measurement. By utilizing efficient software “robots”, installed locally on managed servers, NimBUS provides an extremely high level of management functionality while imposing little to no stress on the managed devices themselves.

Each of the NimBUS probes contains a configuration GUI where the administrator sets the thresholds for when to generate alarms. Often there are multiple threshold levels for minor alarms, high severity alarms or critical alarms and default thresholds are automatically established along with default alarm text and severity.