I got a call today from a solutions specialist at one of IBM’s larger resellers.  He had what he thinks is the perfect first opportunity for our client, Tek-Tools. The opportunity was at a relatively small shop - 2 VMware ESX servers and one IBM N-Series filer.  The issue was that the person responsible for managing the environment was having performance problems and the environment was growing rather quickly.  Maybe too quickly.  So he needed some visibility into the source of the problems and the growth. I had shown him Tek-Tools Profiler for VMware and Profiler for NetApp, about a month ago. Sorry, I can’t give you the reseller’s name, because you never know how the parents might react, if you know what I mean.

Some have described Tek-Tools’ Profiler Suite as a bit of a Swiss Army Knife.  It provides reporting and monitoring on almost everything.

Swiss Army Knife


The big difference at Tek-Tools is that the product family is truly modular. If you only want reporting for your TSM environment, you get Profiler for TSM. If you only want reporting on your NetApp filers, you get Profiler for NetApp. And if you only want VMware reporting, you get Profiler for VMware.If you are a startup and you have big dreams of starting small and branching out broadly as you grow, remember to keep your architecture modular. One tightly integrated environment might seem like the right approach, but as you grow, your development efforts will be crushed under their own weight. And, unless you want to sell to the rare few that value the full set of tools, you better be able to sell the one tool that gets the job done. Sometimes, all you really need is a knife.