ManageEngine hones enterprise search for IT admins

Anyone who’s been an IT administrator for a decade or more will tell you of the good old days when there was far too little information about the underlying IT configuration of a given enterprise. Now, the problem is too much information — which can be just as useless unless put into the right context. That’s the issue that ManageEngine said it’s addressing with a new Enterprise Search function for its IT360 IT management software.

“There are too many IT consoles, too many vendors — one for network management, one for help desk, one for application performance,” said Raj Sabhlok, president of ManageEngine’s parent company Zoho. Pity the poor admins who have to piece all that information together to figure out what’s going on, or worse, what went wrong.

The search function promises these woebegone admins a “Google-like interface” that lets them search on a device name, for example, and get back every instance in which that name crops up.

“If you search on the term ‘Windows’ it will surface all instances of Windows — in SolarWinds, in ManageEngine, in Numara (now part of BMC ), then you click on a hyperlink and it will take you right into that native context,” he said.

If you search on a given server type, it will bring back every instance of that server along with all the applications that touch it or have referenced it. “You can see the nodes, the inventoried assets, any notes in the help desk file or in your CMDB (configuration management database),” Sabhlok said.

The search is part of ManageEngine’s overall IT360 on-premises management product but will work across all relational database backends he said. And the beauty is it will work on competitive management products like the aforementioned SolarWinds. “SolarWinds is siloed. So are we, but we know customers need one way to find and view this stuff,”

The company may end up breaking Enterprise Search out as a standalone package, over time, he added.