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BMC Software Inc. on Monday will advance the level of integration between its Patrol application management suite and the network management tools acquired with Perform SA.
As part of its application-centric network management initiative, the Houston management software provider will release new versions of the Visualis graphical network modeling tool and the DashBoard troubleshooting tool.
Visualis 1.2 now automatically detects and displays all 230 Patrol Knowledge Module agents, providing a comprehensive view of all the components that make up a given service.
“You can still visualize all the network traffic, plus the applications and servers in a single tool, so that you can tell where the real congestion points are,” said Gerry Roy, director of product marketing for BMCs network bus unit, in Aix en Provence, France.
“If you want to do a good job at performance management at the application or end-user level, youll have to have a holistic view of the infrastructure,” said Jean Pierre Garbani, senior industry analyst at Giga Information Group, in Cambridge, Mass. “That means data has to come from the servers, databases, applications—but also from the network. Any of these components could be a potential bottleneck.”
The combination of the two tools is powerful, said Joe King, director of systems services at the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative, in Herndon, Va.
“The DashBoard piece gives detailed statistics about whats going on with each device on the network—virtually a real-time look at whats going on from a statistics point of view. The Visualis piece gives a graphical presentation and real-time look at your network and congestion, and allows you to look at problems in real-time and solve them in real-time,” he said.
Both Visualis 1.2 and the new DashBoard 6.4 releases now store management data in the Common Information Model format, allowing users to query each using the same reporting tool. Although each product still maintains a separate database of management information, BMC intends to integrate them in later releases.
The new DashBoard release also adds broader support for Cisco Systems Inc. devices. BMC also integrated Dashboard with its Patrol for Service Level Management, speeding problem resolution by allowing automated correlation of application response degradation and network congestion.
Both new releases will ship Monday.