System Management Arts Inc. (Smarts) and BladeLogic Inc. on Monday will announce that they have teamed up to integrate their respective fault management and data center provisioning tools.
The agreement calls for integration, as well as sales collaboration, from the two vendors. The partnership combines Smarts InCharge monitoring, correlation and root cause problem analysis with BladeLogics Operations Manager.
Operations Manager will use analysis data from InCharge to repair the system configuration or update the application or the system itself, according to Vijay Manwani, CTO and founder of BladeLogic in Bedford, Mass.
“We can take Smarts (InCharge) events and initiate configuration actions or compliance changes, and we can send events to Smarts to use in their analysis to determine if configuration problems are responsible for outages,” described Manwani.
The combination of monitoring and fault analysis with operations management is a natural fit, and there will likely be similar agreements in the future, believes Jasmine Noel, principal at Ptak, Noel & Associates in Boston, Mass. “I think youll see a lot more of these type of alignments, because people are coming to the realization that what people call management – which is really monitoring and analysis — and what they call operations should be working in lock step with one another. This recognition that these tools should be working together is a long time in coming,” she said.
The BladeLogic Operations Manager provides for the secure provisioning and configuration of Unix, Linux and Windows servers and automates changes required for application updates, patches or configuration repair. InCharge can determine the business impact of infrastructure problems by tracking the interaction of network components, systems, applications, services and the users they support. It uses a common information model and event correlation engine to help determine which problems have the greatest impact on service levels.
As InCharge analyzes the root cause of performance or availability problems, it sends events to the BladeLogic Operations Manager to look at configuration policies, make configuration changes, and feed information to InCharge about the changes it makes to applications.
In the future, the two vendors plan to provide deeper integration of their tools. “Later well provide InCharge with application configuration and inventory information,” said Manwani. He would not say when that was planned.
The integrated products are available now.