Maximizing Monitoring of Custom Applications

The purpose of the document is to highlight the strengths of the product BMC® Performance Manager Monitoring Studio by Sentry Software™ and demonstrate how this product is best suited to maximize the monitoring coverage of custom applications and components for which there are no out-of the-box solutions within the BMC Performance Manager environment. The document details the various options available for custom application monitoring, then gives a brief window into the features of BMC Performance Manager Monitoring Studio and illustrates how it allows the customer to rapidly setup the monitoring of various diverse custom applications. A comparative analysis illustrates how this solution fares compared to the other available solutions from a feature, cost and R.O.I. point of view.

In today’s tough business environment, the use of custom or non-standard applications is a common way to gain an edge over competitors. As these applications are often intrinsically linked to critical business services, it is vital to monitor their health and availability just as you would do for any standard packaged application. In addition, it is often essential to monitor certain basic system elements or processes, monitor and analyze files, folders, databases, or other diverse infrastructure components.

Monitoring, and managing the monitoring of diverse components, applications, processes and technologies is easier said than done. The vast range of applications, solutions, technologies and platforms that an IT environment is composed of makes the monitoring coverage a real challenge. The higher the monitoring coverage, the more secure and efficient is the IT environment and its linked business-services. The stakes are high but the harsh reality is that every organization faces either crunches and/or restraints whether budgetary, time-related or human-resources related. Constraints translate into making choices, and the net result often leads to gaping holes in the monitoring coverage. Generally, it is custom applications and non standard technologies that find themselves in these “holes” as they the ones often left un-monitored owing to the difficulty in finding the right solutions within reasonable costs.

Effective monitoring management of in-house applications, or setting-up custom “watches” on critical components requires an easy-to-use, flexible, scalable and integrated solution. This solution should ideally be able to consolidate several monitoring needs and be able to automate systems management such as through-recovery actions, and reduce trouble-shooting time by clearly identifying problem areas so that administrators can devote more time to strategic tasks.

BMC Performance Manager Monitoring Studio is such a solution. It enables the monitoring of any custom application, device or IT components for which there is no out-of-the-box monitoring solution available on the market AND it helps consolidate diverse monitoring needs within just one solution. It is a multi-platform solution with which you can monitor diverse applications and technologies. This results in fewer tools, fewer consoles, and lesser monitoring management issues and mainly, no more “holes” in your monitoring coverage.

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.