Why we like Indicative

We see Indicative as the best Service Management solution on the market today and complimentary to the other Performance Management products in our portfolio.

Indicative started life at Hewlett Packard's Openview labs in Colorado where a new division was created to design a product line which would focus on Service Management. The product became known as Agilent Firehunter after the HP and Agilent split and acquired many customers in the Telco and Service Provider markets. Then in 2000 John Smith took the Firehunter team and their product and founded Indicative Software to focus on the enterprise customers.

In total around $35 million has been invested in R&D for the Indicative product line and there are over 300 implementations around the world which will testify to the stability and scalability of the product.

We immediately noticed one of the key strengths of Indicative lay in the fact that it was designed and built with Service Management as its goal unlike other competing products which often started life as event-based network monitoring products and have been adapted to do a job which they were not designed to do. In many cases these competing products have grown through acquisition into huge frameworks that are difficult to deploy and maintain.

The first thing that impressed us about Indicative was the ease of implementation and the fact that it in a single product you could cover Infrastructure Performance (IPM), Application Performance (APM), Service Levels (SLM) and Business Services (BSM).

At the heart of Indicative is the Service Model. This is a hierarchical representation of your business services which can be easily created by dragging and dropping templates from the extensive template library. Many components even have Discovery Engines built in which will automatically discover your network, servers and applications.

The open flexible architecture makes it simple to integrate with any existing products you may have in place. Measurements can easily be pulled into the product from many sources such JDBC data sources, text files, scripts or executables, Windows Perfmon or SNMP.

The monitoring approach in most cases is Agent-less meaning that components can be monitored remotely without the need to install agents. This massively reduces the implementation time as well as ongoing patching and upgrades meaning rapid ROI, lower cost of ownership and minimal professional services are required.

There are multiple user interfaces into the product (JavaGUI, Web GUI, Dashboard, Notifier and GeoServices view) which means it can address the needs of everyone from the IT Manager through to the IT operations and support teams.

Another great feature of Indicative is the pricing model which is based on the number of measurements used. As your infrastructure changes these measurements can simply be redeployed since they are not tied to specific machines or technologies. This avoids any chance of the product becoming 'shelf-ware'.

If you are looking for an all-in-one flexible Service Management solution which can be rapidly deployed, uses Agentless collection techniques, allows you to model your services, has built in alerting and reporting and can integrate with your existing tools we recommend Indicative.