Tivoli upgrades systemwide manager

VIENNA, AUSTRIA - While it may have a long way to go before it can deliver a truly integrated systems management package, Tivoli has broadened the scope of its availability and performance management suite.

At last week's Planet Tivoli conference, the company took the wraps off Tivoli Business Systems Manager (TBSM) 1.5. TBSM monitors and controls system events, such as a device or application failure, as well as resource usage data from multivendor sources across a company. Specifically, it pulls data from multiple management systems into a single console, which can help customers identify and correct problems more quickly.

The original TBSM release was focused on integrating data from Tivoli applications. In Version 1.5, TBSM can collect information from IBM's WebSphere for OS/390 server and third-party systems management packages such as Computer Associates' Unicenter TNG, Landmark's TMON, BMC's MainView and Candle's Omegamon.

Interest in single-view management tools is growing as companies realize that finding the root cause of a performance problem requires correlating different components of an application event chain, says Jean-Pierre Garbani, an analyst at Giga Information Group.

But Garbani says Tivoli's integration efforts are still aimed largely at integrating its own products, and the few third-party ties it has created aren't enough. TBSM users aren't looking to tie in rival management frameworks such as CA's Unicenter, he says. Rather, it's more important to create ties to the multitude of point products that tackle specific management tasks and could be cobbled together in a best-of-breed approach. "Tivoli doesn't offer an integrated solution that's really standard or accessible to a number of smaller companies," Garbani says.

In addition to Tivoli, companies working to integrate data into a single view include Managed Objects, which offers a Common Object Request Broker Architecture-based integration engine so disparate monitoring tools can communicate; Hewlett-Packard, which depends on Tibco middleware to enable application integration in OpenView; and Micromuse, which, in its Netcool suite, consolidates data from various monitoring products.

TBSM initially ran on only Windows NT; Version 1.5 adds Windows 2000 server support. Tivoli also made moves to speed deployment of TBSM, including incorporating autodiscovery features and autoconfiguration scripts that replicate basic configuration scenarios.

TBSM 1.5 is available now. Pricing is based on network and system configuration.