FieldView has updated its suite of data center infrastructure management (DCIM) suite, adding among other new features a set of DCIM tools specifically for operators of multi-tenant data centers.

FieldView launched the new release of the software suite (5.0) Tuesday at the DatacenterDynamics conference in New York City.

Colocation providers using FieldView 5.0 may now give every tenant a dedicated online portal to monitor their specific infrastructure deployed at the provider’s facility. The provider controls what parameters the tenant can access.

John Consoli, senior VP of sales at FieldView, said the suite now provides the colocation provider with power reporting client-by-client. They also now have a management and reservation system within FieldView for identifying available space in the data center and reserving it for a particular client if necessary.

The new release of FieldView also has enhanced heat-mapping capability, taking environmental readings from SNMP devices. “The heat map pulls information from temperature sensors in the data center and creates a thermo-graphic image,” Consoli said.

The enhancements include better graphical representation of the environment, new user controls, a snapshot capability and new metrics –reporting feature that maps the environmental conditions on a psychrometric chart.

FieldView has also added a business-intelligence (BI) module to the suite. The BI agent appears as a tab in Microsoft Excel.

“Instead of creating an analysis tool from scratch, we’ve created an interface that allows the customer to add a BI agent as a tab thqt runs in Microsoft Excel,” Consoli explained. “We polled all of our existing clients and over 90% of them reported that they use Microsoft Excel in their process to manage information in their data center.”

The agent takes data collected by FieldView and inputs it into Excel. This includes any data the suite is capable of collecting: environmental data, asset management, capacity and space-planning data.

The feature adds another level of customization to the DCIM solution. With the previous release, customers could only get data through pre-made reports. Now, using Excel tools (such as formulas), they can create customized reports.

Other enhancements to the DCIM suite include a capability to prioritize critical devices for quicker data delivery and a new asset-management agent. The company has also introduced “FieldView Lite” – an entry-level version of the suite that features only the core functionality but has an upgrade path to FieldView 5.0.