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BMC Software Inc. Monday moved to consolidate fault management into its Visualis network performance modeling tool.
The new Patrol Visualis Fault Manager, released as a part of Patrol Visualis 1.3, uses the same map to show both performance data actively gathered through polling of network resources as well as reactive availability information.
“In the same tool you can look at the performance of the infrastructure, have maps up that show availability, do trap forwarding, alert management—in the same maps that show performance,” explained Gerry Roy, director of product management for Patrol Network in Austin, Texas.
“That is the nice concept with this software. You can represent the whole network as a map, and it can show which pieces are going down a lot,” said beta tester Arkadi Chekhtman, a network specialist at Canada Life Assurance Co., in Toronto. Such visualization is especially useful for help desk operators. “You want them to look at things graphically. You dont want them to have to learn four or five different tools,” he added.
BMCs Roy asserted that the move mirrors a trend toward consolidating different management disciplines into a single tool. Industry observer Ray Paquet, a Gartner Inc. analyst in Lowell, Mass., agrees that there is “a massive trend toward consolidation—period.”
“The clients want to deal with fewer vendors. If they can get more functionality in a single product to do that, then right now they are doing it,” he added.
The Houston-based company also provided integration in Visualis 1.3 with the Patrol Dashboard graphical interface for real-time status, and it can forward events to the Patrol Enterprise Manager console, which can correlate multiple events coming from databases, applications and the network.