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In order to ensure the availability of their IT infrastructure, mid-sized and large organizations use professional IT management tools. BMC Software is the market leader in this area with its solution BMC Performance Manager, which is based on two different technologies: the BMC PATROL framework and BMC Portal. BMC PATROL and BMC Portal can be described as frameworks accompanied by sets of technical solutions dedicated to the monitoring of a given piece of the IT infrastructure. Here are a few examples:
| ▪ | BMC Performance Manager for Servers is comprised of the PATROL Agent (the core layer of the PATROL framework) and several modules dedicated to various aspects of the UNIX and Windows operating systems |
| ▪ | BMC Performance Manager for Exchange is dedicated to the monitoring of the Microsoft Exchange Server email servers |
| ▪ | BMC Performance Manager for Internet Services is dedicated to the monitoring of various Web servers and associated technologies |
 | In BMC PATROL’s terminology, a solution based on the PATROL Agent dedicated to the monitoring of a specific component is called a Knowledge Module (KM). |
While similar frameworks are available from BMC Software’s competitors (notably from HP with OpenView, IBM with Tivoli, CA with Unicenter as well as other open-source solutions), it does not make sense for an organization to consider the complete implementation of an alternate IT monitoring framework in order to cover a specific monitoring need. One of the key advantages of deploying such frameworks is the ability to facilitate the monitoring management by addressing all needs, or as many as possible, through the same framework – which ultimately results in lower costs and higher levels of productivity and performance. Most organizations tend to implement a single monitoring framework to monitor all of their IT infrastructure and applications for obvious economical reasons and for the sake of compatibility, interoperability and efficiency.
Since this document is about the product BMC Performance Manager Monitoring Studio, which is specifically designed uniquely for the BMC Performance Manager (also known as PATROL) environment, it focuses only on this environment.
It studies solutions compatible with the BMC Performance Manager framework that allow its users to monitor their customer applications or other components of their IT infrastructure that are not covered by out-of-the-box solutions. As such, this document only applies to organizations already using the BMC Performance Manager/BMC PATROL framework to monitor their IT.
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