Frequently Asked Questions

FireScope Business Service Management delivers a single, web-based interface that monitors every aspect of IT Operations, from infrastructure to business impact. Created to make IT more efficient, FireScope BSM is designed around simplicity, affordability and maximized aggregation capabilities.

FireScope distinguishes itself by offering the same feature set as solutions offered by the Big 4, but at a fraction of the cost, a fraction of the complexity and a fraction of the headaches.

Traditional approaches to monitoring are limited to silos, monitoring individual hosts or technologies in isolation. FireScope breaks these silos by organizing your assets into the business services they contribute to, enabling you to see how events on a single router or server impact the services your business depends on.

It doesn't do laundry.

FireScope compiles events and metrics from all of your networked assets through its powerful Enterprise Service Bus, and processes this data in real-time, always keeping an eye out for any early signs of failure. As critical events or performance thresholds are identified, FireScope can alert your IT staff and even initiate automated responses, dramatically reducing the time it takes you to resolve these issues.

Absolutely! In fact, FireScope lets you define SLA's around any aspect of your IT Operations. Whereas traditional solutions only allow SLA's to be defined around uptime, FireScope can analyze SLA compliance based on performance, security or even business outcomes.

Yes, and this is a key element for successful Business Service Management. FireScope can collect key business metrics from your critical applications, such as revenue generation, expenses and lead maturity statistics to provide visibility into how IT is impacting the business.

In short, anything accessible over your network. Any asset, from network equipment, to servers, to virtual machines, to applications, can be monitored by FireScope in real-time.

Over 11 different methods of data collection are included out of the box, such as SNMP v1-v3, Syslog, rich Agents, persistent network connections, streaming data feeds, web services and more. In addition, its Enterprise Service Bus architecture makes it easy to extend FireScope's data collection capabilities, all through a web interface that doesn't require programming or extensive training.

Of course. In addition to parsing log files of any standard format, FireScope includes support for JMX, WMI and other application-level monitoring technologies. If the application also utilizes a database backend, FireScope can connect directly with the database to perform any standard SQL query to measure transaction performance as well as critical business metrics.

User perception of website performance can't always be derived by monitoring database and system health. That's why FireScope includes a web monitoring feature that simulates a user experience and measuring performance and outcomes of each step of commonly performed user tasks. For example, with an E-Commerce website, FireScope can simulate adding items to a shopping cart, creating an account and performing the transactions, all the while tracking response times and output from each page.

While a lightweight Agent is available, you have complete control over what methods you use for data collection.

FireScope BSM starts at a fraction of the cost of the competition, and is priced based on the number of assets you wish to monitor. This compares quite favorably with traditional BSM solutions that typically start at $200,000 or more. Contact sales to receive a quote.

Maintenance and support programs are only 18% for Standard and 22% for premium.

Nope. In fact, as long as you have an active support contract, any new feature or enhancement developed for FireScope will be available at no extra charge.

Nope. You can have as many users as you like at no additional charge, and every user can create their own custom dashboards to tailor their view to their operational role.

Not a chance! Unlike most monitoring and management solutions that make most of their revenue through hidden nickel and dime fees or expensive consultants, FireScope's philosophy is simplicity through and through.

You can download a virtual appliance of FireScope BSM directly from this site in a variety of formats. The Enterprise-Edition is also offered as a physical appliance with everything preconfigured; just plug it in and go!

Nope! FireScope is designed for a complete self-service experience. Intuitive wizards and extensive contextual help guide you through every process, making it by far the easiest solution you've ever deployed.

As long as his microwave isn't flashing 12:00, even Bob can get FireScope up and running.

Once you've downloaded the virtual appliance, the solution can be up and running in mere seconds. Monitoring your first assets can be done within a few minutes, especially if you use FireScope's powerful discovery capabilities.

Depending on your hardware and license, a single virtual appliance can monitor up to 2,500 networked elements.

The Enterprise-Edition of FireScope is designed to connect up to 1,000 geographically dispersed appliances and deliver a single, global view of IT Operations.

Business Service Management enables organizations to align technology with the business services or processes that they support, and delivers insight into how events and performance of these assets is impacting the business. In short, BSM empowers you to manage your technology from the business perspective.

Business Service Management takes traditional monitoring to the next level by focusing on how technology enables or impacts the business. Traditional monitoring solutions are limited to silos, looking at individual hosts or technologies in isolation and focusing on technical metrics and events that are meaningful only to IT. Business Service Management expands upon these capabilities, breaking silos and logically grouping technology into the business service consumed by your customers, where individual events and metrics are analyzed for their impact on the user and the business.

Improved incident response, based on the financial impact to the business, and increased productivity are just the initial benefits for organizations that implement Business Service Management. From a strategic perspective, investments in BSM can result in significant IT budget savings and increased accuracy in reporting. In short, Business Service Management from FireScope makes IT simpler, easier and more valuable to the business.

Although Business Service Management has historically been implemented primarily in Fortune 1,000 businesses, we at FireScope believe that any organization that relies on technology to run their business can benefit from this new approach to IT management. Cost and complexity have been the primary factors that have prevented smaller organizations from embracing BSM, which is why FireScope has been designed from the ground up to shatter these barriers and offer the world's first Self-Service Business Service Management solution.

BSM should exist anywhere technology meets your customer. While the Data Center is a good starting point for most organizations, retail outlets, customer kiosks and point of sale systems are just as critical to the business as your routers and servers. That's why FireScope introduced Sentinel, delivering a small footprint sensor that can bring even the smallest branch location into the umbrella of Business Service Management.

Now. Unlike our competition, who typically require 90 days or more to get their solutions up and running, with FireScope clients can begin receiving value on their investment from day one. By delivering our solution via virtual or physical appliance, most of the installation process is already done for you. And with extremely flexible discovery capabilities, intuitive wizards and contextual help and best practices on every page, FireScope makes it easy to get up and running at a fraction of the time and complexity of our competitors. Don't believe us? Download a trial today and experience FireScope for yourself!