At its annual user conference, BMC Software on Monday announced several initiatives aimed at supporting service providers and helping IT managers maintain service-level agreements.
BMC said it is partnering with Compaq and Aprisma Management Technologies on Compaq's ServiceLevel/Rx application monitoring service, released today by Compaq.
ServiceLevel/Rx allows service providers to monitor electronic-business application performance and to proactively identify and resolve service outages and degradations, BMC said in a statement.
BMC's enterprise management suite, Patrol, and Aprisma's Spectrum infrastructure management software will support Compaq Global Services design and implementation services to monitor and manage applications, BMC said.
Compaq will also increase the number of its Patrol-certified professional services consultants, BMC representatives said.
BMC officials said today that the company is adding a certified engineering program for Patrol for Service Level Management to help Compaq and its other partners deliver post-sales implementation services.
In related announcements, BMC released the beta of Patrol End-to-End (ETE) Response Timer to monitor intranet application performance, and announced that it's extending its Web application performance monitoring service, SiteAngel.
SiteAngel, a BMC service hosted by service providers, can now automatically double check a slow or failed connection, said Mary Nugent, BMC vice president and general manager of service provider solutions.
For example, if the SiteAngel application at a New York site can't reach its counterpart at a San Francisco site, it will automatically negotiate with an Austin SiteAngel to also try the San Francisco site, Nugent explained. If the Austin SiteAngel can access the San Francisco application, it pinpoints the problem as between New York and San Francisco and notifies only the appropriate IT managers, cutting down on false alarms, she said.
Patrol ETE allows IT managers from within a firewall to monitor end user experience by placing a robotic agent on a client, running a synthetic transaction from the client and monitoring the progress of the transaction click by click, said James R. Byrd, a BMC marketing manager for Patrol ETE.
The difference between SiteAngel and Patrol ETE is "basically the difference between a service and a product," Byrd said.