BMC Beefs Up Performance-Management Tools

BMC Software's new MAINVIEW Perceive and PATROL for iSeries-Perceive provide Web-based access to performance-management data for mainframes.

BMC Software Inc. on Tuesday added a pair of new performance-management tools to its Enterprise Performance Assurance lineup that extend the Web-based management capabilities into mainframes and AS/400s.

The new MAINVIEW Perceive and PATROL for iSeries-Perceive provide Web-based access to historical performance data on mainframes and their applications as well as AS/400s and their applications.

"Now we have a common way on the Web to look at performance across all server environments. It is common technology, common look-and-feel and common use [across Windows, UNIX, Linux, mainframe and iSeries servers]," said Dave Wagner, director of product management in Waltham, Mass.

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The existing Patrol Perceive performance-data-access tool was also upgraded to support new applications, including Oracle e-Business Suite, Siebel, IBM WebSphere as well as SAP R/3, allowing users to understand the application-resource usage of those environments.

The Performance Assurance capacity-planning tools allow users to gather and analyze both historic and current performance usage and create business-oriented baselines. They can be used to evaluate the impact of business change on IT or the impact of IT change on business, Wagner said. "You can predict what will happen if an organization makes a change in IT—such as response time for end users will get better or worse—and by how much," he added.

The simple Web-based view of performance data can be used by line of business managers to get a self-service view of performance.

The Perceive Web server-based tools can run on any platform, and they can automatically discover any other BMC offerings already in use within a production environment, the company said. It can gather data from other BMC agents or data stores and connect to asset databases to view how assets are being used.

"Weve had customers find 10 to 50 servers that were doing nothing. Once they find those, users can drive incremental cost out of the enterprise," said Wagner.

MAINVIEW Perceive and PATROL for iSeries-Perceive are due in January from the Houston, Texas-based company. The software starts at $20 per server for the Windows version and $110 for the mainframe version.

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