Compliance Ready—CA
Nimsoft And
SupernaNet.Converge
Executive Overview
Compliance solutions involve a lot of technology and processes that must comply with government and
industry standards. This brief covers VCE Vblock™ Systems compliance solution for Monitoring with
CA Nimsoft and SupernaNET.Converge Probe for Converged Infrastructure Monitoring with CA
Nimsoft.
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Compliance Functionality Categories
Overview CA Nimsoft
Manage and monitor your data center infrastructure with Nimsoft from CA
Nimsoft products monitor and manage business services and specific systems within the IT infrastructure,
including network components, servers, databases, applications, and virtualized environments.
With Nimsoft products, customers can monitor systems hosted in internal data centers, as well as in
externally hosted environments, including software as a service (SaaS) and cloud computing
environments.
Overview SupernaNET.Converge Probe for CA Nimsoft
As customers rapidly adopt the Vblock Systems from VCE, management tools need to keep pace to
ensure that this converged infrastructure is managed as a whole and not as individual components.
SupernerNet.Converge Probe for CA Nimsoft leverages VCE Vision™ Intelligent Operations and
VMware vCenter Operations Manager to provide a single integration point for VCE Vblock Systems
management. With SupernaNET.Converge and CA Nimsoft, VCE Vblock Systems fault monitoring, root
cause failure analysis, and SLA monitoring of critical applications are dramatically simplified. CA
Nimsoft with SupernaNET.Converge allows to visualize all Vblock Systems components and virtual
machines with real time health status, alarm aggregation, and component alarm tagging.
The Probe fully leverages the Nimsoft bus architecture to scale alarm collection and delivery to UMP
dashboards. Installation is simple drag and drop onto a robot in the Nimsoft Infrastructure Manager tool.
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The probe supports many to one management of Vblock Systems in a centralized probe deployment or
leveraging distributed robots for geographic deployments. It uses the Nimsoft architecture to collect data
from probes and reliably deliver and store the data for real time display and processing of notifications.
How the Solution Enables Compliance
This solution integrates with VCE Vblock Systems to enable the whole platform to be monitored with a
compliance dashboard to quickly find and display all components—logical and physical—that are used
within a compliance end-to-end application.
The CA Nimsoft UMP Dashboard with the SupernaNet Converge probe plugin allows devices and virtual
machines to be selected from a topology tree and included in the dashboard. Once this is complete, the
dashboard button enables a quick view of all critical components, health status, and real time alarms for
any device or virtual machine under management.
To comply with regulatory requirements, security events and alarms from the VCE Vision™ software or
VMware vCenter can now be filtered quickly to verify that no security events or alarms are present. The
ability to select a subset of the components on Vblock Systems for monitoring enables compliance to be
an inventory function of dynamic Vblock System environments to isolate key infrastructure delivering on
compliance applications. This allows Vblock Systems to run mix workloads, including compliance
applications as shown in the dashboard.
In addition, a wide range of probes from CA can be deployed to gain further detailed alarm, OS,
application, network and storage fault, and performance data on Vblock Systems to complete the
management of all aspects of Vblock Systems.
Many add-on products enable trouble ticket integration, CMDB integration with gateway solutions to
many CA and other 3rd party products.
The key components required:
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CA Nimsoft Monitor
SupernaNet.Converge Probe
Vblock Systems
VCE Vision software
The solution simplifies compliance by ensuring that all critical elements in the infrastructure are
monitored for faults and security alarms, for example, too many login attempts. The dashboard below
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allows several different compliance views to be selected against any object under management, VM,
blade, storage, network etc. The filter allows a quick and easy way to zero in on managed objects in scope
for a particular compliance requirement such as HIPAA or other standards as well. In a future update to
the SupernaNET.Converge probe alarms will be marked with a subsystem ID string that identifies any
alarm from a device with one or more compliance tags. This will allow automation and actions within
Nimsoft Monitor Alarm handling NAS probe (for example, gateway to ticketing system, email or other
actions can be triggered based on custom rules).
CA Nimsoft UMP And SupernaNET Converge Probe Compliance Dashboard
Figure 1 Dashboard highlights in scope elements on a Vblock System based on the compliance filter
menu
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Figure 2 Remove unnecessary compliance columns from the dashboard
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