Monolith Software is an upstart in a business service management, or BSM, market dominated by BMC, CA, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM. A glut of acquisitions has helped the Big Four cobble together costly BSM behemoths that are usually bears to implement and maintain. By contrast, Monolith built mSuite ITM Core 3.2 from the ground up to enable BSM-like capabilities using a single architecture. Best of all, a typical installation costs $80,000--often less than the annual maintenance fee for a traditional suite.

We tested mSuite, which is based on the open source LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) architecture, in our Real-World Labs and found it a good value and, for some shops, a reasonable alternative to traditional network management products like OpenView.

However, mSuite lacks a few key modules that include service-based root-cause analysis and network topology. In addition, organizations that need user and admin documentation must rely on a sparse online wiki, and most will require installation and configuration help.

WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?

BSM is all about showing how IT operations affect the business. The goal is to reduce downtime of critical services, such as e-mail or customer-facing apps, by grouping all relevant physical devices and software into logical units based on business function. BSM encourages us to break away from managing assets using traditional IT categories, such as Windows servers and Oracle databases. In theory, BSM-oriented operations groups can more quickly understand why a service is down and resolve the problem faster.

In practice, though, IT groups using BSM software often experience considerable frustration grouping devices into logical services. Unfortunately, like larger vendors, Monolith does little to ease this angst--though mSuite provides a grouping function, it's a manual process.

Once we accomplished that task, we were most impressed with the product's dashboard engine. MSuite let us create widgets that are visually layered on other widgets. This makes creating dashboards similar to working in Visio. You can send objects to the background or foreground at will and generate graphical representations of devices or groups of devices in a flash. We have yet to see an easier-to-use dashboard engine.

For its display, Monolith uses Scalable Vector Graphics, or SVG, so Java, ActiveX plug-ins, and heavy client interfaces are just bad memories. Because SVG is an XML application, the SVG file is a simple text file that can be easily viewed and edited. The dashboard performed like a race car in Firefox, with instantaneous updates, and offered several options for look and feel. For Internet Explorer, however, you may require an SVG plug-in.

The ability to create containers within the dashboard means IT can group similar network or application elements into business service views tailored by audience. We set up these dashboards in minutes.

While all data is stored in a single MySQL database, Monolith let us segment access to the data in a variety of ways. This lets service providers limit customer visibility or create different views based on user, geography, or device function. New in this release are a Web-based dashboard engine, redundancy capabilities, and an IP service-level agreement reporting engine for collecting, storing, and graphing data.