The Web Services Report

Paglo has been steadily building out its feature set as a Web 2.0-style solution to IT management. The latest improvements to hit the service include support for monitoring virtual machines, as well as patch management. Being able to monitor both physical and virtual machines from the same cohesive interface like this is really killer and the new patch management system is sure to ease some headaches during upgrades.

Paglo also seems firmly set on a price point of $1 per device monitored, per month. This seems like a good pricing strategy, but I would like to see Paglo adopt a similar strategy to Amazon Web Services in making the pricing more flexible based on exactly what clients need. Currently Paglo users have to pick from packages such as "Up to 300 devices," "Up to 400 devices," etc. Even though this is a pretty traditional model for pricing web services, I think that it seems a bit dated, especially with a $1 per device sort of model. Why not let Paglo analyze the network, add devices and bill for exactly how many devices a company is using, rather than sticking clients with paying for unused device slots? If a company only has 130 devices, it seems unnecessary to make them pay for 200, especially when the monitoring technology is in place to adjust for what you actually use on a per month basis like Amazon does. Paglo would obviously take a revenue hit on this, but it would save companies from flirting with the line between subscription plans, knowing that if they add their 101st device that it costs an extra $100 instead of an extra $1. Paglo's model is, of course, the way that most similar companies structure pricing plans, but maybe it is time for a market shift.

All minor gripes on pricing aside, these new features are welcome additions to an already robust toolkit for IT administrators. IT has a strong focus on rooting out problems with a network and with machines on that network. Traditionally, there tended to be a lot of guesswork associated with finding the source of a particular problem. With all of these new features that Paglo keeps on adding, they are making IT into a much more exact and manageable science.

Since we first covered Paglo in November 2007, the site has seen some significant advances. On Monday, Paglo is implementing a visual representation of NetFlow traffic data.

Basically, NetFlow allows IT administrators to see a detailed view of traffic patterns by protocol. You are able to see who is using the bandwidth on your network in order to better understand why the network is congested. This can be a very powerful tool for IT administrators, and it adds another notch of value to Paglo's Web 2.0 IT product, which I've endorsed in the past.

Since we last checked in, Paglo has also introduced a monetization system. Paglo was free during its beta period, but now it has a monthly subscription model in place. Users pay based on how many devices they want to index and also how long they want to store data for reporting.

Managing 50 devices and storing data for 30 days costs $50 a month. The prices scale up from there. Users can still use the service for free, but the free version has serious limitations.

Users of the free service can manage only 20 devices and can store data for only seven days in the past. Only keeping seven days of data basically makes trend data features worthless because it can't effectively track them.

Although the prices may seem high by consumer standards, keep in mind that this is mostly meant for the enterprise, so the higher price tag fits.

Paglo is billed as "The Search Engine for IT." I think that is a pretty accurate description of the company's product. They take a Web 2.0 approach to gathering and displaying data about a network and the devices in it. If you want an in depth look at how Paglo works and all that it has to offer, I would recommend checking out my review, from November. For the purposes of this post, I'm just going to cover what they're doing now.

Paglo is launching the public beta of their service today. Currently, Paglo has been implemented at 800 companies, each with a target employee size of between 50 and 1,000 people. The core functionality of the service remains the same, but the most exciting addition is Paglo Share-its.

Share-its allow Paglo users to share their searches, dashboards, and alerts with other Paglo users. Theoretically, Share-its will eliminate the need for every IT person to create their own solution to the same problem. For example, if a new security exploit is found in a certain version of Flash, someone in the Paglo community might create a Share-it to identify the devices in the network that are at risk and need to be patched. Perhaps another Paglo user collaborates and improves upon this Share-it and creates an even better solution. Now, the entire community benefits from what they can collectively solve. Paglo is calling this "social solving" and I think that it could be a very powerful asset.

Paglo is free for everyone to use, at least through this summer. At some point in the future, Paglo has said that they may start charging a monthly fee for the service, or at least for the advanced version of the service.

As I said in my previous review, I really think that Paglo is doing a lot of things right here. With the addition of Share-its, Paglo is certainly taking an already killer service to the next level. As the first solid Web 2.0 IT startup, I would really love to see them do well, so if you are in the IT sector, give it a look and maybe you will have a few less headaches trying to solve problems and a few less fires to put out.

The Web 2.0 style IT management tool, Paglo launched in beta on Monday.

Paglo is essentially an IT search engine that indexes a ton of information about the network you are managing. For example, if you are concerned about how many copies of Microsoft Office are installed on computers at your company and want to make sure that you are complying with your license, Paglo allows you to view that statistic in real time.

There are three key elements to Paglo: the Crawler, Search Index, and UI. If you are a network administrator, for example, you install the Paglo Crawler on your computer, and it will crawl the entire network, looking for computers, installed applications, devices, such as BlackBerrys, and information about users. That data is then uploaded to Paglo's secure servers and loaded into your personal Search Index.

Once all of this data is online, you can access it from any Web browser, so your access is not limited to only when you are at work. Maybe network admins can finally get some vacation time and still stay up to date with what's going on.

Paglo's UI basically works by allowing you to search for key terms you are curious about within your network. It can also, for example, allow you to find the e-mail address for any user on the network if there is a problem with his or her system. The real value of Paglo, in my opinion, however, is its Dashboard feature.

Paglo's Dashboard can be compared to a customizable home page, with space for widgets that show you different data about your network. So, if you want to save your search for computers with Office installed, you can put that data on your Dashboard, in graph form, for quick reference.

When I talked with Paglo CEO Brian de Haaff and CTO Chris Waters, one of the things that they were the most excited with is the ability to share search queries with the Paglo community. If one IT pro comes up with an extremely useful, but complicated, search query, you can just grab that query and put it on your Dashboard, instead of having to come up with it yourself. This, in combination with Paglo's open API, creates a great opportunity for a variety of mashups and dashboard widgets.

Paglo is concentrating on delivering a quality, free product for now but will most likely be adding additional premium functionality in the future for a price. It's nice to see Paglo bringing IT into the Web 2.0 realm. Hopefully it will gain enough traction to grow into an essential tool.