Nimsoft, a business unit of CA Technologies, on Tuesday announced new "see as you go--pay as you go" capabilities of its industry-leading, unified monitoring solutions that enable service providers to bring elastic IT offerings to market.

Available as part of the Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS) and Nimsoft On Demand offerings, the extended feature set includes real-time usage metering, elastic portlets and unified service dashboards. Service providers and IT staffs can now automatically create and deliver monitoring data and alerts that expand and contract with cloud and virtualized service delivery, while tracking and archiving usage in real time for auditing and billing purposes.

"Nimsoft is well-known for its flexible, scalable approach to monitoring internal and external cloud services," said Albert Lee, senior analyst, Enterprise Management Associates. "These real-time usage metering capabilities and customized dashboards look to be a practical development for IT administrators to monitor and manage infrastructure and services, in line with the continued growth of the 'pay as you go' model we are seeing increasingly embraced across the industry."

Elastic IT services are highly appealing to customers who want their costs to dynamically align with their actual utilization. These new Nimsoft capabilities simplify the real-time monitoring and management of infrastructures that service providers use to deliver elastic IT services--enabling them to automate the presentation of monitoring dashboards to clients and flexibly bill for their monitoring services.

"Our ISV partners are extending their on-premise enterprise application products to include on-demand SaaS ones," said Marty Gauvin, CEO and president of Virtual Ark, an international managed services company. "With these new features, Nimsoft On Demand allows us to adjust monitoring services depending on our clients' dynamic needs. This enables us to align our costs closely to revenues from end users buying the SaaS solutions we provide through our ISV partners, thereby significantly reducing both the risk and cost of delivering an on-demand SaaS version of their traditional enterprise applications. The enhanced Nimsoft solution will help us continue to provide premiere service levels and improve both our top and bottom lines."

Key enhancements to NMS and Nimsoft On Demand include:

• Real-time usage metering - Automated, granular reporting and usage monitoring enables service providers to bill their clients accordingly. Usage monitoring and metering is viewable by both service providers and clients 24/7 on the Nimsoft unified monitoring portal, which can integrate seamlessly into any other portal. Usage metering updates occur at hourly intervals.
• Elastic portlets - Dynamic display portlets automatically expand and contract with the monitored IT Infrastructure, displaying key monitoring data. These portlets are reusable across service provider clients and IT organizations.
• Unified Service Dashboards - Reusable and automatically updated, these customized dashboards are easily constructed by aggregating elastic portlets, usage metering data and other information. NMS and Nimsoft On Demand come pre-packaged with out-of-the-box service dashboards for VMware® health and performance, Amazon Web Services(TM) and overall data center performance. Dashboard views can be tightly coupled with the service provider's service catalog, including cloud-based services.

"Virtualization and the implementation of public and private clouds are driving a major shift in the way IT services are delivered," said Gary Read, senior vice president and general manager of the Nimsoft business unit at CA Technologies. "Our 'see as you go?pay as you go' unified monitoring solutions enable IT staffs and service providers to better understand and manage these new delivery models?without requiring incremental investments, re-learning of technology or implementation of new infrastructure requirements."

The new unified monitoring capabilities are now available for both NMS and Nimsoft On Demand as features of the solution, to new and existing customers alike, at no additional cost.