Cutting Through the Real-Time Data Fog

CIO — According to David Williams, research VP of IT operations management at Gartner, there is a new class of IT management applications (Williams calls them "learning technologies") that can gather and synthesize real-time data, correlate it with historical data and allow companies to anticipate potential problems—say, a critical networking issue for a retail website. "It's a technology that learns what's important to your company," says Williams. According to him, three vendors have noteworthy products in this space:

Integrien
The company says its Alive product, using what it calls "integrity management," identifies, predicts and prevents IT-based business problems via holistic views and real-time analysis of IT infrastructure.

Netuitive
According to Netuitive, its product eliminates the need for labor-intensive and error-prone manual setting of performance baselines and thresholds by self-learning a company's normal operating characteristics. Then it continuously correlates, analyzes and adapts itself to data inputs from all of the systems, servers and processes—in real-time.

ProactiveNet
The company claims its Business Services Management solutions improve understanding of the performance and availability of IT services and how infrastructure affects the applications and processes that power the business. With this greater understanding, companies are better able to prioritize IT systems around processes that carry the highest business values rather than around the latest problem at hand.