On Thursday Nimsoft (Nasdaq: CA) announced that BlueLock has deployed the Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS) across its infrastructure, which supports the delivery of a diverse range of cloud hosting offerings to enterprise and SMB customers.

NMS replaced Nagios, providing BlueLock with greater monitoring capabilities required to effectively manage large client configurations and reduce the time required to set up new customers.

During phase one of the rollout, BlueLock implemented NMS across its internal IT infrastructure. In phase two of the roll out, BlueLock will create web portals for its customers, so they can have direct, real-time visibility into the performance and health of their critical systems.

"NMS gives us tremendous flexibility and scalability while reducing the time and effort it takes to set up new customers," said Chris Hartmann, system engineer at BlueLock. "Nimsoft also offers us a wide range of application-specific probes--as well as the ability to quickly and easily write custom probes using Nimsoft APIs."

BlueLock's cloud hosting offerings utilize a variety of platforms and technologies--including UNIX, Windows, Active Directory, Oracle, SQL Server and networking equipment from multiple vendors. According to Hartmann, it was relatively difficult and time-consuming to configure new customers with Nagios. For a typical environment of five servers, Hartmann's team would have to spend two-four hours setting up all necessary monitoring functions

NMS, in contrast, reduced that time to 30 minutes or less by automating many aspects of configuration. NMS also makes it easy for BlueLock to provide its customers with web portals that offer intuitive, graphical insight into systems and application status.

"NMS reduces BlueLock's management costs even as it allows them to offer greater value to their clients," said Gary Read, senior vice president and general manager of the Nimsoft business unit at CA Technologies. "BlueLock can also use NMS performance metrics and trending information to proactively address their customers' changing needs with recommendations for increased capacity, infrastructure upgrades and other service enhancements."

BlueLock plans to deploy NMS across its entire BlueLock CloudSuite by the end of the year, starting with Virtual Cloud Enterprise and Virtual Cloud Professional clients, and continuing with its with vCloud Express clients.