BMC’s on PATROL to Monitor Web Site Performance
BMC Software (Houston), in an effort to provide its customers with a complete business-to-consumer Web infrastructure, has announced two initiatives designed to give businesses a comprehensive view of how well their Web site is serving users and customers.
BMC announced the release of PATROL 2000, the latest version of its service level management tool, which provides service-level management function to allow businesses to monitor the quality of service their end users receive.
New features of PATROL in the 2000 release include simplified installation, centralized event filtering and notification and better scalability. The new product provides the ability to implement user-defined and managed service levels and measure transaction response time through the addition of two new tools, PATROL for Diagnostic Management and PATROL for Performance Management.
David Wagner, director of product marketing for PATROL at BMC, says the latest release of PATROL incorporates technologies BMC has adopted through company acquisitions including Boole and Babbage and BGS.
“PATROL 2000 represents the integration of several industry-leading technologies that we’ve acquired over the years,” Wagner says.
To complement PATROL’s functionality in finding and diagnosing service difficulties from inside the data center, BMC will now also offer a service for monitoring Web site performance for users outside the firewall. BMC acquired Internet management provider Evity, which hosts SiteAngel 2000, a service that allows businesses to monitor their Web site’s transaction performance.
Evity SiteAngel 2000 is an online service that monitors the performance and availability of static and dynamic e-business Web pages on a scheduled basis to provide an accurate view of users’ experience. The service gives IT managers a detailed view of user experiences through its ability to record, playback and re-record a multistep Web transaction from within a Web browser. It does not require programming or scripting or installation of any additional software.
Given the restrictions on bandwidth capacity and disk storage space, Wagner claims it would be impossible for any company to get a detailed account of every transaction between a customer and an e-business Web site. However, he explains, the information available through SiteAngel 2000 provides an accurate assessment of a site’s overall performance and service quality.
Coupled with PATROL 2000, Wagner continues, the Evity service provides a complete solution for service-level management. Businesses can set a targeted response time service level for an application or path transaction, and if SiteAngel detects a decline in performance, they can use PATROL to diagnose and correct the problem at the source. Wagner says the combination of these two services is essential to effective performance monitoring.
“If you do have a problem, how do we determine what those problems are, and how do we try to fix them?” Wagner asks. “By offering both PATROL and SiteAngel, together they provide a total, and for the first time from one vendor, end-to-end solution. ... The goal is enabling our customers to realize a continuous improvement model for their customer relationship.”
BMC is offering the SiteAngel 2000 service on an annual subscription basis, rather than as a packaged solution. A one-year subscription is priced from $6,000. PATROL 2000 products are now in general availability. Pricing varies according to the number of servers managed and size of applications in an enterprise environment.
Related Editorial:
BMC Takes CONTROL of Single Sign-OnRelated Information:
BMC Software (new window)PATROL Overview (new window)