BMC Software Inc. last week advanced the level of integration between its Patrol application management suite and the network management tools it acquired with the purchase of 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 and DashBoard trouble-shooting tools.
Visualis 1.2 automatically detects and displays all 230 Patrol Knowledge Module agents, providing a comprehensive view of all 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 business 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, an analyst at Giga Information Group Inc., 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,” King said. “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.”
Both Visualis 1.2 and DashBoard 6.4 store management data in the Common Information Model format, allowing users to query each application using the same reporting tool. Although each product still maintains a separate database of management information, BMC intends to integrate them in later releases.
In addition, BMC integrated DashBoard with its Patrol for Service Level Management, speeding problem resolution by allowing automated correlation of application response degradation and network congestion.
The tools are available now.