If IT services at this year's Olympics and Paralympics in Beijing hummed like clockwork, it was thanks in no small part to a unified IT monitoring solution that provided unprecedented coverage of the Games' IT infrastructure across the data centre and all competition venues.

The end-to-end solution from Singapore's NetGain Systems (www.netgain-systems.com) enabled support teams to manage and monitor the networks, servers, database and application systems and helped ensure that IT outages were kept to a minimum. It also provided IT administrators with an effective means of identifying, isolating and resolving the problems in the quickest time possible.

In previous Games, real-time or non-real-time monitoring of the IT architecture only covered the data centre and some of the game sites. "For the first time in Olympics history, the unified monitoring of competition and management networks was achieved, serving a dozens of technical support teams in over 40 competition venues," said NetGain's Chief Executive Officer Mr Toh Soon Seah.

NetGain's IT monitoring solution provided coverage for the IT infrastructure across all competition venues of the Beijing Games.

The system ensured the smooth functioning of equipment including 90 Unix servers, 220 Lenovo servers, 400 workstations and over 1,000 network devices. It could even detect if paper feeds were needed in any of the 1,184 printers used in the Games.

The monitoring was carried out using NetGain's "EV + EM" two-tier distributed multi-node real-time IT monitoring system. NetGain EM (NetGain Enterprise Manager) is a plug-and-play hardware appliance that does the actual collection, monitoring and reporting of availability and performance statistics in the IT environment. One or more instances of EM is typically deployed to monitor the IT networks, which could be logically or physically separated.

NetGain EV (NetGain Enterprise Vista) is a unified management system which consolidates the data from different EM appliances, and provides a single unified management view of all the IT networks managed by individual EMs. In a typical customer deployment, multiple EMs would be deployed in the branch offices and a central EV is hosted in the headquarters. All information from the remote EMs will be synchronised with the central EV.

During the Beijing Olympics and Paralympics, EM equipment was installed in every venue, while EV was used for centralized information gathering. With an easy-to-use graphical user interface, the solution provided device views, business views and topology views to all teams involved in supporting the IT infrastructure of the Games.

During a rehearsal in the run-up to the Games, staff on duty set a record time for troubleshooting - they took only 14 seconds from receiving the alarm to recovery of the system. This would not have been possible without an onsite unified monitoring system, said Mr Toh.

NetGain was set up in 2002 with part of its initial seed funding coming from the Singapore Economic Development Board subsidiary, Seeds Capital. It is also an Overseas Development Programme and Infocomm Local Industry Upgrading Programme partner of the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore.

The company's flagship product, NetGain Enterprise Manager, is an intelligent plug-and-play appliance that monitors and manages IT infrastructure in real-time, from a business perspective. The solution is designed, developed and manufactured in Singapore and exported to China, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.

NetGain won the contract to be the sole IT monitoring solutions provider for the Beijing Games after a rigorous year-long selection process. It was selected from a field of top-notch contenders which included a leading US multinational corporation.

According to Mr Toh, what sets NetGain apart from other vendors is its approach to IT monitoring. Whilst many players provide a purely software solutions to IT monitoring, NetGain takes the appliance approach, providing plug-and-play devices with built-in software that can be easily connected to the IT network.