BMC to Unveil New Performance Manager

BMC Software Inc. this week will launch the next generation of its widely used Patrol application performance management software, which begins to move away from Patrols classic reliance on agent technology that is difficult to deploy and maintain.

BMC is one of the first of the four leading enterprise management providers to publicly embrace a non-agent-based architecture for instrumentation and instead rely on standard instrumentations being put into operating systems and applications.

Smaller tool providers that support monitoring and management have already gone this route, but they dont have the market presence that BMC brings to the table.

BMC officials in Houston said the agentless technology can do about 80 percent of the work that agent-based products can, and the company will deploy a lightweight agent to perform the rest of the functions.

Click here to read a review of Patrol Visualis 1.4.

Remote collection technologies being used in the new BMC Performance Manager, which will replace Patrol, include standards such as Perfmon and Windows Management Interface, for Windows; SSH (Secure Shell), for Unix; Telnet; SQLNet, for remote databases and Java Management Exchange Extensions; SNMP; and others.

For Patrol users at financial services firm LSI, in Santa Ana, Calif., agents have been an issue "because various firewalls potentially block access to agents from where the console is, and some agents require administrative access on boxes we dont want to give that access to," said Marc Machin, senior systems engineer.

BMCs Performance Manager is aimed at combining Patrols enterprise-class management with the ease of deployment and use of the scaled-down Patrol Express. In the next evolution of Patrol, users can indicate what they want to manage, and the software determines what it needs to manage it.

Performance Manager is made up of three components: an umbrella BMC portal that will incorporate interface modules from other BMC management products, a central server that provides reporting from a central database and provisions and deploys the collection components of the tool, and an RSM (remote systems monitor) probe that collects management data from a single site or department and makes it available to the server.

The central server provisions the RSM, which, in turn, provisions a lightweight local presence for mission-critical servers.

By reducing Patrols complexity and administrative burden, BMC hopes to help IT operations lower the cost of ongoing support for business applications.

BMC will further this aim with Performance Manager by eliminating separately licensed versions of Patrol specific to the operating system, database and application and replacing them with a Performance Manager for Servers, Performance Manager for Databases and Performance Manager for SAP, Siebel and other solutions.

BMC Patrol evolves

The Migration Plan for moving from BMC Patrol to BMC Performance Manager includes three phases:

* One View Single user interface, dubbed BMC Portal, consolidating Patrol Central Operator, Patrol Express UI and Service Impact Manager; available now

* One License A single license for Patrol and Patrol Express monitoring, with no separate licenses for Linux, Windows and Unix versions; available next month

* One Architecture BMC Performance Manager for Servers, Databases and Applications replace separate Patrol products specific to the operating system, database and applications; available starting in December and rolling out across next year

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