BMC Performance Manager Monitoring Studio

BMC Performance Manager Monitoring Studio is a KM for PATROL and is also available as an agent-less solution for BMC Portal. It enables administrators to set up the monitoring without coding, of almost any application for which no standard monitoring solution is available. In a few clicks, and thanks to intelligent wizards, it can cover up to 100% of critical applications within your BMC Software monitoring environment. This is a monitoring toolbox that offers diverse monitoring tools.

Centralized monitoring management: BMC Performance Manager Monitoring Studio not only allows consolidation and centralization of diverse monitoring needs through one solution, but it also offers the ability to group the monitored objects application-wise or as best suited to the organizations specific monitoring-management needs. This renders the monitoring management far more efficient and productive.

Monitoring basic yet critical system elements: Effective monitoring of an application or any part of an IT infrastructure cannot ignore monitoring the basic system elements: processes or Windows services, file systems used by the application (often critical), its folders (directories) and its most critical files. BMC Performance Manager Monitoring Studio allows administrators to set up the monitoring of these "basic system elements" in a very easy, yet effective way.

Retrieving valuable information using standard but diverse technologies: Getting valuable information through diverse means such as JMX, SNMP, WBEM, Windows performance counters and Windows event logs is often essential, especially if there is no monitoring solution for a non-standard or customized software application. Monitoring Studio enables the administrators to gather information using the SNMP protocol (polling and trap listening), WBEM and WMI queries, Windows performance counters and event logs. The JMX polling feature of this product facilitates monitoring of JBoss, JOnAS, WebLogic, WebSphere or any generic JMX -enabled Java application under a single icon. There is no need to interrogate these diverse application servers through their respective interfaces. Also, just as for any “information source”, advanced string searches and numeric values extraction can be performed easily.

Fine-tune the monitoring with powerful string and numeric value searches: The intelligent wizards of the product ask for details on the information sources you would like to monitor: multi-line LOG files, scripts and commands output, HTTP requests, database queries or WBEM and WMI queries. Administrators then specify what they are looking for within these sources, strings to be found or not, numeric values to be extracted, etc. Once an “information source” is defined, a detailed string search can be set up using the following options:

BMC Performance Manager Monitoring Studio offers one of the fastest and most advanced string searches available on the market. The product is proven to be able to handle 4 gigabytes of XML-formatted log files at once in less than 10 minutes, without even taking the monitored system down.

Graphical visualization of numeric values monitored: Problems with an application are not always as simply represented as a sentence stating “an error has occurred.” At times, an application reports its health by providing critical numbers, like those of the number of waiting customers, queued requests, processing time, etc. Perhaps it is helpful to know and be alerted on the number of clients are waiting to connect to an application or how many jobs still need to be processed. Number searches allow administrators to extract actual values in a given text and build graphs from these values with alert thresholds. This can be done with most of the Monitoring Studio tools such as file-analysis, database queries, SNMP polling, etc.

Automated alert acknowledgement: Event-driven monitoring (like SNMP traps, LOG files or Windows events) rarely integrates with icons that are supposed to show the current state of a monitored object. This is what acknowledgment is all about. On detection of a failure, the icon of the monitored object should ideally reflect an alarm state, but then reverting to the normal state often necessitates a manual action. This is annoying if the average frequency of alerts is relatively high. BMC Performance Manager Monitoring Studio features automatic acknowledgement capabilities. Alerts triggered by an event can be automatically cleared by either another event or a timeout. This way, no manual operation is required. More intelligent automation translates into optimization of resources and higher productivity.

Specific automated recovery actions: The administrator can select the type of specific actions to be taken when an alert is triggered (application failure occurs etc.). With Alert Actions, it is possible to either customize the way a notification is performed for an application alert, or specify execution of a recovery action when a problem occurs:

However, in terms of ROI, it turns out BMC Performance Manager Monitoring Studio fares very well as compared to the difficulties that custom KM development entails. The next section compares the 3 available options in term of features and cost.