BMC Software Inc. is looking to emphasize the “manage” in managed services with a new monitoring service.
The Houston-based application management provider at Comdex in Las Vegas on Tuesday will introduce its GuardianAngel Monitoring Service.
The subscription-based service allows application service providers or hosting providers to create a hosted service that can deliver server, network and application monitoring to multiple tenants.
The service is designed to complement BMCs Patrol enterprise-oriented application performance management line. It provides a lower level of monitoring at a smaller entry cost and requires less expertise to deploy and maintain.
“Some of our best customers are saying that for certain applications, they dont want to a put full-blown Patrol solution in – theyre looking for the Volkswagon Bug instead of the Cadillac approach,” described Mary Nugent, vice president and general manager of BMCs Service Provider Solutions in Houston.
Despite the troubles service providers are seeing now, BMC is convinced the service provider model will dominate in the next few years, Nugent said.
The two main components of the GuardianAngel service are the Service Integration Portal and Remote Service Monitor — a small piece of code that provides monitoring without requiring an agent on a managed device.
BMC is looking to patent the way that the service can traverse firewalls. “Because we are doing this from the Web, we have to securely traverse a firewall doing everything from [virtual private networks]to Network Address Translation,” said Nugent.
The Service Information Portal runs on BEA WebLogic Servers and uses an Oracle Corp. database for its datastore. It can be added into an existing back office provisioning system used by the service provider.
It provides a subscription interface that can be customized by the service provider for individual customers, and an administrative view over all the services.
The lightweight Remote Service Monitor can monitor servers inside the service providers data center, or it could be used at the customers data center to provide a monitoring service from outside the firewall.
Compared to BMCs existing SiteAngel Web site monitoring subscription service, GuardianAngel “digs inside the firewall and looks at whats going on in the (servers) and provides a quick status report,” Nugent said.
When it ships on Tuesday, the initial release will monitor Microsoft Corp.s Windows NT and Windows 2000 Web servers, Oracle and Sun Microsystems Inc.s Solaris. A later release in February will add support for Linux, SNMP, HP UX and IBM AIX.
The monitor can look at CPU and memory utilization, page files, overall database response times and other performance indicators.