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Red Hats announcement that it is adding network and system monitoring to Red Hat Network isnt that much of a surprise. More unexpected is Red Hats decision to support Solaris with it.
Red Hat Incs RHN (Red Hat Network) is a Web-based systems management platform. In the past, its typically been used to manage RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). As such, RHN is often used manage patching, provisioning, rollback, and configuration management.
The new Monitoring Module now adds application, system and network managment to the mix. As for its Solaris support, Red Hat sees this cross-platform support as being helpful for Solaris users migrating to RHEL.
RHNs new management functionality makes it somewhat comparable to Novell Inc.s ZENWorks for Linux.
Application monitoring probes form the foundation of the Monitoring Module.
These probes can be created by users, or network administrators can use pre-built probes. Once built, the probes can be used to monitor systems, networks or applications. Over 60 pre-built probes are already available. These will include probes for Oracle, MySQL, Apache and BEA applications.
At this time, Red Hat has not spelled out exactly which applications will be supported at the start.
Users can also group these probes together in what Red Hat calls probe suites. Once a suite has been created, administrators can deploy them to multiple systems or networks at once. Local administrators can then tweak each probes configurations for their specific requirements.
Like other monitoring tools, RHN also supports real-time e-mail and pager alerts when a probes critical threshold is reached. This module also supports simple probe reporting and gives administrators access to raw data.
“Enterprise customers have relied on Red Hat Network to update, manage and provision systems efficiently and cost-effectively for years,” said Paul Cormier, Red Hats executive vice president of engineering, in a statement.
“Working with enterprise customers, weve designed a solution for two other major infrastructure concerns: security and migration. Monitoring and cross-platform support via Red Hat Network give customers greater efficiency and confidence in their network security,” Cormier said.
The RHN Solaris Management tool can be used to patch legacy Solaris environments.
Red Hat claims that with this tool, customers with both Solaris and RHEL deployed will be able to manage both operating systems with Red Hat Network. Therefore, making a complete transition to RHEL is made much simpler.
Red Hat also announced enhanced Red Hat Network support for heterogeneous environments that include Windows and Unix via collaboration with BMC Software Inc.
“This partnership enables customers with heterogeneous environments to have much greater control of the overall change process, greater visibility into their assets across all platforms, and significantly lower total cost of ownership,” said Rich Novak, vice president of BMC Sales.
The bigger and better Red Hat Network will be available by the end of August.