To achieve their strategic business goals, companies require an effective IT organization. Therefore, IT performance has to be continuously measured, documented, analyzed, and systematically improved. The integration of a comprehensive business service management approach, coupled with the central management of networks, systems, and applications provides the foundation that allows companies to monitor their IT-enabled business processes. It also gives them information that is tailored to the needs of their individual users.

theGuard! Business Service Manager allows companies to consistently monitor their heterogeneous IT landscapes. It is based on powerful components for the management of networks, systems, and applications. The individual services can be flexibly combined to form what is called business services. Features such as intelligent correlation, visualization, analysis, monitoring, reporting are then available for use with these newly created business services.

This is the basis that allows companies to define customer-specific service levels and to automatically monitor compliance. An adaptive alert concept and the integrated root cause analysis allow administrators to quickly troubleshoot and resolve problems.

• IT-enabled processes and systems are monitored
• easy integration with ERP systems
• management of systems, networks, and applications irrespective of vendor
• automated alerting with workflows for all types of operation
• topology and VLAN management
  

theGuard! Business Service Manager employs standard protocols (e.g. SNMP, WMI, and WBEM) to fully capture IT infrastructure data. It is the world's only software that is capable of automatically detecting and centrally managing every single hardware component (such as active components, servers, air conditioning systems, etc.), irrespective of equipment vendor (PSM technology). theGuard! also gives you an instant overview of your applications, operating systems, databases, etc. The solution captures and analyzes the system status, events, and performance data in real time. The integration is achieved with the help of specific business connectors. Currently, these support a multitude of commonly used applications, databases, operating systems, management systems (e.g. Virtual Center, Oracle Enterprise Manager, etc.), and ERP solutions (e.g. SAP).

To obtain more data, administrators can choose to integrate any source that is relevant to their business services (e.g. systems or applications) into theGuard! Business Service Manager. The "correlation engine" supports companies in mapping their IT services. A "workflow engine" can be added to this module to map process-controlled response or change schemes.
Normalized data pools (theGuard! CMDB) and the high level of automation in theGuard! enable companies to quickly display and analyze even the most complex interrelations within their IT operations. REALTECH's proprietary VAA (Visual Assisted Analysis) method allows for the graphical representation of logical and physical relationships between components and provides a visual indication of their operating status and their interdependencies with IT processes.
The new "adaptive business cockpit" interface combines the advantages of a comprehensive and normalized data pool with the automatic detection of applications. If, for example, a company uses Microsoft Exchange, the software will automatically know which type of monitoring will make the most sense for the e-mail server. All relevant parameters are compiled into a concise dashboard. theGuard! offers these adaptive views for a wide variety of applications by default.