BMC touts its Patrol 2000 management package at conference

LAS VEGAS -- BMC Software at its Assurance 2000 conference here on Monday heralded its recently announced Patrol 2000 application management system, focusing on e-business and transaction management as well as on the product's reporting capabilities and repository. But attendees raised questions about issues such as upgrading to the product.

The company at the event unveiled the Patrol Enterprise Manager component of Patrol 2000, which provides a single, enterprisewide view of a user environment and manages events from incompatible platforms in multiple geographic locations. Enterprise Manager, known as Command Post in earlier incarnations, joined the BMC stable when the company acquired Boole & Babbage in April 1999. The package provides a wizard-based methodology to guide users through tasks such as identifying raw messages. SLA (service-level agreement) management can be improved via the product, according to the company.

Saverio Merlo, BMC vice president for Patrol 2000, stressed that the company in the past year has had to deal with issues such as integrating its offerings with products gained in its Boole & Babbage acquisition. With Patrol 2000, "We changed what was a service-level agreement proposition into a different proposition."

Patrol 2000, which was announced May 8, offers end-to-end application response and availability measurement, automatic diagnosis and problem resolution for services, service-level policy settings, and publishing of reports on compliance against SLAs.

The package also features record/playback capabilities for e-business applications as well as transaction monitoring. Patrol 2000 can assess the impact of transactions on Web sites, predicting service levels as the volume of transactions increase, Merlo said.

Additionally, the company has done "a lot of plumbing work, particularly on the agent side," emerging with a single-install process, Merlo said.

A repository has been fitted into Patrol 2000 in the form of an embedded Oracle database to improve reporting capabilities, Merlo said.

Another component of Patrol 2000, known as Patrol Diagnosis, automatically diagnoses root causes of problems pertaining to the Microsoft Exchange messaging platform.

BMC's new Patrol Operations Manager, meanwhile, provides domain management, featuring centralized filtering and notification.

Patrol user Jim Schaeper, manager of enterprise systems management at National City Corp., a bank in Cleveland, said he was pleased with Patrol 2000's service-level reporting capabilities. "That's been a prime gap that we've had in our own company," Schaeper said.

But he and other attendees had questions about the package.

Schaeper asked about the role of BMC's repository vis a vis Microsoft's plans for Windows Management Instrumentation WMI, and whether Microsoft would be offering similar functionality for free. Merlo said BMC has plans related to WMI that could not yet be discussed.

Another attendee asked about the ease of upgrading Patrol customizations from Patrol 3.3 to Patrol 2000. Merlo said there would be backward compatibility for Version 3.3 users, but not for users of previous releases.

"Unfortunately, if you are on a release before 3.3, you will have to get at least to the 3.3 level in order to take advantage [of backward compatibility]," Merlo said.

Merlo also was asked whether users of BMC's Maxim database would need to migrate away from Maxim to use Patrol 2000. He responded there would be no pressure to do so, but that the company is available for those that do want to migrate.

BMC at the event also announced: