What do you think of BMC’s ProactiveNet?

BMC's ProactiveNet Analytics product is the subject of this week's application performance management solution profile and user feedback forum. Acquired in 2007 to round out BMC's business service management solution set, BMC ProactiveNet now nests within the BMC service assurance solution family. The product's primary claim to fame is its ability to automatically recognize normal performance behavior and proactively detect and warn IT staff when abnormal behavior sets in--hence the ‘proactive' in the name.

The underlying idea is that by gathering data about transactions and the infrastructure that supports them, then applying analytics, BMC ProactiveNet learns to distinguish between normal and abnormal behavior and sounds an early warning before performance goes off the rails. This is very different from the conventional event-based application performance management approach, and in theory should make it easier and faster to recognize and fix problems. We'd like to hear from those of you in the know to find out if it is as good in practice as in theory.

BMC ProactiveNet Analytics serves as a consolidated vantage point from which to view correlated data gathered from many sources. The product filters out what it deems non-essential information to present only "intelligent events". BMC says that BMC ProactiveNet begins to be useful within days of installation, gets "smart" within two to three weeks, and it continually and automatically adapts to changes in performance behavior.

BMC tells us that they are data-source agnostic and can integrate with any number of incumbent solutions when brought into a large enterprise with multiple data collection solutions already in place. BMC ProactiveNet can gather information from its own data collectors, or from a host of other sources, commonly including Coradiant, Keynote, and Gomez.

According to BMC, customers routinely welcome them in to help make sense of mountains of monitoring and event data from other vendor's products. They tell us that about 70 percent of the BMC ProactiveNet's more than 150 customers fit this profile, with the remaining 30 percent consisting of online retailers who generally rely on BMC's proprietary data collectors for gathering performance data about their web retail properties. BMC tells us that most of their BMC ProactiveNet customers rely on monitoring data resulting from synthetic transactions, but they can also accept passive monitoring data.

Tell us about your experience. If you have deployed BMC ProactiveNet Analytics tell us what you think. Has it lived up to your expectations? What were your impressions? A simple "I like it", "I have mixed feelings", or "I hate it" response is fine--but if you have insight to share with the community, then talk all you want. You can post a reply to this blog using your name or anonymously.

• Network Management
• Application Performance Management
• BMC