Founded in 1993, SMARTS devoted its early years to the research and development of its powerful InCharge platform. Today, InCharge technology powers the world's most popular management solutions, and is used by thousands of customers around the world to automate the hardest tasks in IT management
InCharge Service Assurance Manager
InCharge Service Assurance Manager is the cornerstone of the InCharge management suite, and the industry's smartest manager of managers (MoM). It integrates and correlates topology, events, and analysis from multiple sources, and works with the InCharge Global Console or Business Dashboard to provide a real-time, end-to-end perspective on your business-critical IT environment, its health, and its impact on your business. With InCharge Service Assurance Manager as the foundation, you choose the InCharge and third-party solutions that meet your management needs, and integrate them into an end-to-end solution.
Business Benefits
- Eliminates the high cost of silo management.
- Protects your investments by consolidating existing tools into a unified management solution.
- Provides multi-tier visibility into your complex distributed infrastructure, including web-based dashboard views.
- Lets you manage IT end-to-end, across multiple tools, domains, and silos, in alignment with your business.
InCharge Business Dashboard
The InCharge Business Dashboard displays the results of powerful InCharge analysis in a flexible, web-based user interface. Secure and customizable, the InCharge Business Dashboard turns InCharge Service Assurance Manager screens - notification logs and properties, maps, summary views, containment views, and status tables - into individual components, or InCharge Viewlets™. You can combine these viewlets to create your own customized display, enhanced with your choice of icons, colors, and backgrounds. Viewlets can also be embedded into third-party portals or custom web pages, creating a desktop layout with multiple interactive sources of content.
The InCharge Business Dashboard offers these powerful features:
- Tight integration between display and analysis ensures that viewers see up-to-the-minute information.
- Customizable web-based views offer choice of layout, icons, colors, and backgrounds.
- Administrators can assign role-based privileges from read-only to total access, and configure views for specific users or groups.
- Single sign-on keeps data secure while streamlining access across multiple applications.
- Integrated viewlets update automatically as the user's focus changes.
Business Benefits
- Users across all levels of the organization get the information they need, displayed according to their preferences.
- With powerful analysis feeding the dashboard, users can count on accurate, real-time information that lets them act based on fact to protect key business services.
- Web-based views deliver anytime, anywhere access.
- Robust security and multi-level authentication protect data integrity.
- Data-driven views are interactive, so users can manage the business from the dashboard as well as the console.
InCharge Report Manager: Reporting Results of InCharge Intelligent Analysis
InCharge Report Manager captures, organizes, and presents historical views of events and the results of root-cause and impact analysis from InCharge applications, giving you the information you need to:
- Identify chronic infrastructure bottlenecks and problem patterns, and plan corrective action
- Schedule preventive maintenance and plan hardware and software upgrades and replacements
- Study critical metrics, such as mean-time-to-repair and SLA compliance, and refine processes to meet performance targets
- Train customer service staff on handling recurring problems. With InCharge Report Manager, organizations can generate reports about their own networks or deliver business-specific reports to their customers.
With InCharge Report Manager, you can choose from standard, out-of-the box reports that address essential infrastructure reporting requirements or create custom reports to meet the unique needs of your business. Report categories include day-to-day operations, operations management, maintenance view, and architecture/service planning. Importantly, the entire reporting process—from data capture to report generation—is totally automated; you simply define the reporting intervals. And, you can access reports easily from any web browser.
Business Benefits
- Sorting and filtering infrastructure problems based on business impact lets you prioritize resources toward solving the problems that most threaten service delivery or degrade the user experience.
- Correlation between technology failures and business impacts gives customer service agents the information they need to respond knowledgeably to customer inquiries, demonstrating that they are in control.
- Aligning infrastructure management with business objectives maximizes availability and performance of business-critical services, which in turn increases competitive advantage, profitability, and customer loyalty.
InCharge Adapters
InCharge Adapters enable you to update your service assurance solution while leveraging your investment in existing third-party management tools—enhancing the value of the systems you have in place today. Take advantage of InCharge Adapters for leading technologies in EMS and NMS, service management and trouble ticketing systems, performance reporting, system and application management, provisioning management, security management, and more
Business Benefits
- Provides a seamless software gateway for importing events, topology, and analysis results from any source into InCharge.
- Supports consolidation of multiple disparate tools into a single, end-to-end solution.
- Adds intelligence to data collection by associating imported events with topology to provide a context for root cause and impact analysis.
- Deduplicates and filters events at the source, making data collection extremely efficient and scalable.
- Protects your investment in existing management tools.
Systems & Applications
InCharge Application Services Manager: Maximizing Availability and Performance of Mission-Critical Business Applications
For all organizations, sustaining business-critical application services is a top priority—when services falter, impact on productivity and revenue can be dramatic. To protect your competitive edge, you need to be able to pinpoint the root cause of performance problems instantly and quickly take the right actions to restore service.
The industry’s first software to manage application services holistically, Application Services Manager extends InCharge’s unique integration, correlation, root-cause, and impact analysis to the applications and services domain, automatically correlating service performance with details of the health of underlying network, system, and application resources. When service is degraded, malfunctioning, or down, InCharge Application Services Manager automatically pinpoints the precise root cause delivering the information needed to sustain service delivery.
InCharge Application Services Manager:
- Monitors service delivery, measuring service performance by leveraging third-party tools and importing relevant events and data from other InCharge applications
- Places application services in a topological context to represent the application services being delivered and their relationships to other applications, hosts, and network connections, as well as to business elements such as service offerings and clients
- Integrates and correlates application performance with the health of other IT resources, for end-to-end analysis of problems affecting service delivery
- Performs root-cause and impact analysis of authentic service-affecting problems, including complete disruption; degradation, where services are being delivered but performance is unacceptable; and at-risk, where additional failures will disrupt service
Business Benefits
- Automatic identification of the root cause of service problems provides the actionable information essential for sustaining service.
- Maximum availability and performance of business-critical services increases revenue, profitability, productivity levels, and customer loyalty.
- Intelligent automation built into the software dramatically reduces the time and cost to implement solutions, and the cost to operate them.
- Automatic adaptability reduces ongoing maintenance costs.
- Integration and correlation of the results from application monitors with network and system health enhances the value of existing application monitoring investments.
InCharge Application Connectivity Monitor: Ensuring Connectivity to Business-Critical Applications
Keeping business-critical applications always available is one of your top priorities. InCharge Application Connectivity Monitor enhances the power of InCharge root cause analysis by monitoring your infrastructure for key applications connectivity data. Together with InCharge Application Services Manager, Application Connectivity Monitor helps to provide a complete view of application services and delivers vital information needed to ensure service delivery.
Key features include:
- Auto-discovers TCP-based applications
- Monitors TCP ports for connectivity
- Helps pinpoint the root cause of performance problems
- Provides network-centric view of application availability
- Identifies symptoms discovered via health check and feeds them into InCharge Application Services
- Manager for detailed root cause analysis
Business Benefits
- Automatic identification of application connectivity problems helps you sustain service.
- Maximum availability of business-critical applications helps ensure productivity levels to maintain profitability.
- Intelligent automation built into the software enables you to reduce the time and cost of implementation and operation.
- Integration with existing InCharge solutions and other application monitors enhances the value of your existing management investment.
- Network administrators can validate that network connectivity is available to TCP-based applications, ruling out the network as the cause of any application performance issues.
InCharge for Application Servers: WebSphere Edition: Intelligent, End-to-End Management of WebSphere Environments
WebSphere solutions are the basis for so many mission-critical applications that business performance depends on WebSphere availability. InCharge™ for Application Servers - WebSphere Edition gives you total, real-time visibility into your IBM WebSphere environment, pinpointing critical problems affecting complex, distributed WebSphere-based applications, including java components.
The solution's unique cross-domain correlation capability enables InCharge to correlate the performance of WebSphere-based applications with the health of the surrounding application, server, and network infrastructure. As a result, your IT operations teams get the real-time actionable information they need to maximize the performance and availability of production applications and the business services they support.
Business Benefits
- Protects mission-critical eBusiness solutions from unplanned downtime.
- Stops finger-pointing by revealing the exact source of application problems
- Prioritizes problem-solving by identifying infrastructure, application and business impacts.
- Dramatically reduces total cost of ownership by eliminating costly-rules writing, change management, and inaccurate data input.
- Speeds mean-time-to-repair by delivering only the production-side detail needed to find and fix performance issues.
InCharge Server Performance Manager: Proactive Monitoring of Server Performance
You can ensure the performance of business-critical hosts with InCharge Server Performance Manager. A specialized version of the proven InCharge IP Performance Manager, InCharge Server Performance Manager offers all the functionality of the base product plus the ability to discover and monitor host disks and file systems as well as additional information about host processors and memory. It analyzes the root cause of server issues in real time so you know exactly what to fix to keep servers operating at peak performance.
Business Benefits
- Reduces costs by automating root cause analysis of server performance problems and eliminating rules-writing.
- Maximizes server performance by providing critical lead time to address problems before they affect service delivery.
- Gives you the flexibility to choose default polling policies and thresholds, or to define your own with intuitive on-screen commands.
- Improves customer satisfaction by detecting server performance issues before they become hard failures.
Networks
InCharge IP Availability Manager: Automating Root Cause and Impact Analysis in IP Networks
Success in today's market requires 100 percent availability of the service delivery infrastructure. InCharge IP Availability Manager automates real-time root cause analysis of IP network availability problems, and then provides extensive impact analysis. By automatically isolating both the authentic problem™ and its impact on related objects in the IT infrastructure, InCharge IP Availability Manager provides the actionable information you need to correct service-affecting problems proactively, often before users are affected.
Like all InCharge solutions, IP Availability Manager leverages the patented InCharge Common Information Model™ (ICIM) and Codebook Correlation Technology™ to automatically model and analyze your business-critical IP infrastructure. It performs intelligent analysis on day one, because InCharge IP Availability Manager adapts automatically to the managed infrastructure, and continues to update both its model and intelligent analysis as the environment changes - no rules-writing is required. Instant deployment and elimination of ongoing maintenance allow InCharge IP Availability Manager to assure maximum infrastructure availability at the lowest cost.
Business Benefits
- Instant and accurate diagnosis of problems within the service delivery infrastructure enables corrective action before business operations are disrupted.
- Maximum availability and performance of business-critical services increases revenue, profitability, productivity levels, and customer loyalty.
- Intelligent automation built into the software dramatically reduces the time and cost to implement solutions, and the cost to operate them.
- Automatic adaptability from day one reduces ongoing maintenance costs.
- Integration and correlation of the results from application monitors with network and system health enhances the value of existing application monitoring investments.
InCharge IP Performance Manager: Sustaining Service Delivery Through Infrastructure Performance
Designed to give early warnings of potential problems in the managed environment, InCharge IP Performance Manager provides the critical lead-time you need to address network performance issues before they cause problems that affect service delivery. Clear, fully automated notifications, directed to the resources best able to respond, enable problematic network conditions to be addressed before they impact your end-users' experience.
InCharge IP Performance Manager monitors network devices, including host/server resources, and uses SMARTS-patented Codebook Correlation Technology™ (CCT) to pinpoint exceptions before devices fail. It automatically polls for relevant data maintained by each network element and applies intelligent analysis to distill the polled data into actionable information. This information is used to invoke actions necessary to sustain the health of network elements critical to service delivery.
Business Benefits
- Reduces costs by automating root cause and impact analysis of performance problems and eliminating rules-writing.
- Maximizes IT performance by providing critical lead time to address network issues before they affect service delivery.
- Gives you the flexibility to choose default polling policies and thresholds, or to define your own with intuitive on-screen commands.
- Improves customer satisfaction by detecting performance issues before they become hard failures.
InCharge ATM/Frame Relay Availability Manager: Topology Management, Root Cause and Impact Analysis of WAN Data Networks
The size and complexity of provider networks make it difficult to isolate the source of connectivity failures quickly and accurately. InCharge ATM/Frame Relay Availability Manager performs automated problem isolation in large meshed networks, including analysis that crosses the provider edge domain with its core routing and merges ATM/Frame Relay and IP analysis.
InCharge ATM/Frame Relay Availability Manager provides essential functionality for managing WAN data networks:
- Topology and event integration pieces together topology from vendor-proprietary EMSs and SNMP into the InCharge Common Information Model™ (ICIM) Repository, and associates events with topology.
- Root cause analysis leverages SMARTS patented Codebook Correlation Technology™ to automatically pinpoint authentic problems™ in ATM/Frame Relay networks.
- Impact analysis pinpoints the impacts of ATM/Frame Relay problems on other parts of the infrastructure.
- Network visualization maps infrastructure elements and their many relationships across technology domains.
- OSS integration supports element managers, CRM, trouble-ticketing, and provisioning system integrations.
Business Benefits
- Rapid isolation of root cause problems reduces operations costs, improves mean-time-to-repair, and prevents loss of revenue due to missed SLAs.
- Alarm reduction enables you to concentrate on fewer events, increasing productivity and freeing expert resources to focus on other projects.
- Accurate inventory via auto-discovery and topology imports maximizes utilization and minimizes service delivery costs.
- Automatic adaptability to dynamic infrastructure changes reduces ongoing maintenance costs for dramatically lower total cost of ownership.
- Close alignment of the management infrastructure with business objectives builds competitive advantage and enhances market reputation.
InCharge MPLS Manager: Meeting the Challenge of MPLS Management
Enterprise and service providers turn to MPLS to enhance their service offerings and improve their network scalability. However, the management of MPLS VPNs and LSPs becomes increasingly complex as the IP network expands. InCharge MPLS Manager delivers the industry's most comprehensive fault management solution, providing the right software tools to manage these networks. Leveraging the patented InCharge Common Information Model (ICIM), InCharge MPLS Manager delivers cross-domain impact analysis of failures and offers visibility into the MPLS-based VPNs. Many carriers have deployed InCharge MPLS Manager to ensure the reliability of their core MPLS-based service offerings.
InCharge MPLS Manager auto-discovers the logical and physical objects and relationships in the MPLS and VPN domains and pinpoints the root cause of service-affecting problems. It correlates management of:
- The transport domain, including the traditional Layer 2 and Layer 3 elements that comprise the infrastructure in the network.
- The MPLS domain, including the logical connections (LSPs) that are layered over the transport domain, their related policies, and the control entities associated with them.
- The VPN and business domain layered over MPLS, including VPN membership and VPN topology.
Business Benefits
- IP VPNs over MPLS can support hundreds of provider edge and thousands of customer edge routers. InCharge solutions scale easily and automatically to support the largest and most complex distributed infrastructures.
- MPLS-VPN health depends on the underlying network infrastructure. InCharge correlates MPLS-VPN availability and performance with the infrastructure that supports it, pinpointing root cause problems so you know exactly what to fix to keep MPLS-based services up and running.
- Leveraging patented Codebook Correlation TechnologyTM and the InCharge Common Information ModelTM (ICIM), InCharge MPLS Manager provides end-to-end management across transport, MPLS, VPN, and business domains.
- Network operations staff work more efficiently with easy-to-navigate views that show technology and business objects and relationships across domains, including customers and their relationships to MPLS-based services.
InCharge Optical Transport Manager: Assuring Carrier-Grade Voice and Data Services Over Fiber
InCharge Optical Transport Manager offers a highly intelligent, fully automated solution for managing optical Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) and SONET/SDH networks. The solution automates the entire management process, from discovery, topology import, modeling, and monitoring of optical network objects and their relationships, through real-time root-cause analysis of service-affecting problems, including integration and correlation of alarm data from a wide variety of DWDM, SONET/ SDH and traditional circuit-switched devices.
InCharge Optical Transport Manager provides exceptional value while protecting your investments in current network management systems. That's because it collects, correlates, and integrates data from any source — element managers, event managers, and network management platforms. InCharge supports equipment from all major vendors, including Cisco, Alcatel, Lucent, Nortel, Fujitsu, Marconi, Ericsson, and Ciena.
Business Benefits
- Maximizes the availability and performance of voice and data services delivered over optical fiber.
- Manages the optical network in relation to the rest of the infrastructure for an end-to-end solution.
- Automates management to reduce costs and boost productivity.
- Protects investments by leveraging and adding value to existing tools.
InCharge Discovery Manager: Leverages the power of InCharge Auto-discovery and Graphic Visualization™ to display an accurate topology of the managed network environment in real time.
Discovery, Change, and Inventory Management
As networks increase in size and complexity, you need a powerful tool to discover dynamically changing infrastructure components — automatically, and in real time. InCharge Discovery Manager lets you tap the power of InCharge Auto-discovery and Graphic Visualization™ to quickly and easily view an accurate topology of your managed network environment.
InCharge Discovery Manager delivers information about all the physical and logical elements in layer 2 and 3. The InCharge Global Console illustrates the managed topology, including device and connection details.
You can use this information to control technology assets and investments, and support business-critical network availability and management goals.
Business Benefits
- Reduce total cost of ownership by managing IT assets throughout their lifecycle, from planning to disposal
- Avoid unnecessary equipment purchases by identifying and using previously stranded and underutilized assets
- Illustrate topology via a powerful graphical presentation tool
- Generate inventory reports by exporting discovered data to any standard reporting tool
- Streamline network operations through totally automated, real-time discovery that captures detailed device and connection data
- Improve reliability by eliminating the network problems that can result from version incompatibility in critical network infrastructures
- Ensure accuracy by eliminating reliance on out-of-date network diagrams
- Reduce maintenance expense with real-time information about what resources are active in the infrastructure, so unused maintenance contracts can be discontinued
- For managed service providers, speed delivery of service to new customers
InCharge IP Telephony Solution
The InCharge IP Telephony Solution is a powerful system for managing converged networks that support Cisco-based IP telephony. It combines key components of the InCharge and CiscoWorks suites to monitor activity associated with IP telephony, correlate events from underlying analysis servers, pinpoint the exact cause of issues that may affect IP telephony devices, and determine their business impact.
With CiscoWorks and InCharge, you leverage two of the industry's most powerful management solutions to ensure absolute availability of IP-based voice services.
Business Benefits
- Meet SLAs consistently and ensure customer satisfaction.
- Reduce costs through automated analysis.
- Manage IT to meet business objectives.
- Manage geographically dispersed IP infrastructures end-to-end.
- Improve productivity with targeted monitoring that pinpoints service-affecting problems
InCharge Network Protocol Manager : Automating Root Cause Analysis of Routing Protocol Events
If you're having trouble managing the volumes of events generated by essential routing protocols, turn to SMARTS. InCharge Network Protocol Manager (NPM) works with InCharge IP Availability Manager and Service Assurance Manager to help you isolate and quickly resolve routing issues caused by misconfigurations, software problems, and connectivity issues.
InCharge NPM goes beyond passive monitoring to pinpoint root cause problems in routing protocol domains and correlate these events with problems in the underlying IP network. And, InCharge NPM's unique visualization tool gives you exceptional insight into the configuration of routing protocols in a network.
Business Benefits
- Enhances availability of IP networks through deep discovery of the logical routing topology, monitoring of routing adjacencies, and explanation of their failures.
- Provides a unique visualization tool for protocol entities and their relationships.
- Speeds mean-time-to-repair by correlating alarms in the routing protocol infrastructure with problems in the IP network
Security
InCharge for Security Infrastructure Management : Protecting IT with Confidence
With single-screen control of your entire security environment, InCharge™ for Security Infrastructure Management gives you visibility into the state, health, and change control of your security infrastructure. It leverages alarm data from the instrumentation that monitors your security devices, normalizes and consolidates these events, and places them in the context of the network, systems, and services they protect. For the first time, you have a way to centrally manage your entire security infrastructure and understand to how problems in security devices may put other parts of the IT environment in jeopardy.
InCharge™ for Security Infrastructure Management leverages the industry-leading InCharge platform to manage your business-critical security infrastructure. Firewalls are managed as devices in the network, monitored for performance and availability and probed for logins/logouts and configuration changes. InCharge Security Infrastructure Manger consolidates and correlates this information, and performs the following tasks:
- Firewall Performance Monitoring. Proactively monitors the health of key firewall elements, including processes, processors, memory, disks, file systems, applications, and interfaces
- Change Control/Policy Monitoring. Gathers information and sends alerts regarding policy changes and logins/logouts (successful/unsuccessful/read/write) and performs session-level aggregation. Currently, InCharge SIM can integrate directly with key third-party security solutions from Cisco, Check Point, and Nokia.
- Event Management. Provides normalization, correlation, consolidation, aggregation, and de-duplication, and associates events to topology elements, providing a topological context for analysis
Business Benefits
- Single-console control. InCharge SIM collects and consolidates alarms from your security devices, giving you single-screen visibility into the health of your security infrastructure.
- Topological context. You can identify the relationships between security devices and the network, systems, applications, and services they protect. You know how security outages affect your business and can prioritize corrective action based on business impacts.
- Proactive management. InCharge SIM alerts you proactively when a configuration change could expose a potential point of access to cyber attack.
- Security with confidence. When you manage your security solutions as an end-to-end infrastructure rather than as individual product “silos,” you can be confident that your security infrastructure is working to protect your business.
- Better use of expert resources. Staff can spend less time monitoring security products and more time understanding and preventing attacks.
- Protects your investment. Because InCharge SIM leverages existing instrumentation and collects and normalizes event data from any security tool, preserving and adding value to your current security investments.
Business Availability
InChanrge Business Impact Manager : Business-Aware Infrastructure Management
InCharge Business Impact Manager automatically determines the impact of technology events on business services and the customers who use them, giving you the actionable information you need to prioritize resources to keep critical services up and running.
Business impact is calculated by totaling the user-defined values, or "weights," of all affected customer, service, and infrastructure components. InCharge can also include non-IT notifications in its calculations. You add the notification - such as loss of a major supplier or delivery channel - and assign a severity level, and InCharge does the rest.
The InCharge Common Information Model™ (ICIM) is unique in its ability to map business processes and their inter-relationships. Based on this model, InCharge Business Impact Manager can calculate how problems in one business process impact a related process.
Business Benefits
- Boosts SLA compliance by showing you which infrastructure and applications problems impact critical customers and services.
- Maximizes use of skilled resources, because you can prioritize corrective action on the problems that matter most.
- Increases competitive advantage, profitability, and customer loyalty by maximizing availability and performance of business-critical services.
