Micromuse makes service mgmt. foray

Micromuse plans to unveil next month software bundles designed to help companies more quickly relate network faults to application performance and ensure that performance meets to pre-defined service levels.

The company, best known for its Netcool fault management software, says it integrated current technologies, developed some new technologies and added capabilities licensed from application discovery vendor Collation to round out its two business service management offerings: BSM Availability and BSM Assurance. While Micromuse already delivered software to measure the impact of network events on service levels by correlating data from multiple sources with its Netcool/SLA Manager, company representatives say the BSM applications will incorporate intelligent analysis about the application performance and the network.

Scott Orr, manager of enterprise management systems at Dallas outsourcer Affiliated Computer Services, uses several Micromuse management applications across 15 data centers but says the software maker needs to do more work before he commits to piloting its BSM products.

"BSM requires a product to integrate performance alerts and indicators from multiple systems to bring that all together in one view," Orr says. "Netcool does that now with network events and provides a single view of events across the data center, but the company needs to do more work on integrating performance with fault management."

Management software makers, such as BMC, Computer Associates, IBM Tivoli and HP, in the past 18 months have introduced products that promise to correlate how business services perform based on how well the network infrastructure responds to and supports applications. Orr says he is most impressed with product plans from BMC and CA, but he's still waiting until commercial offerings mature.

BSM Availability is server software that lets customers discover the application components across their networks and model services. Upon installation, the software discovers applications and their dependencies, and automatically populates a service model based on the application infrastructure. BSM Assurance takes it a step further by distributing agents to managed devices to let more automated analytics and actions be taken if a network fault causes a service disruption.

The company says the Availability product will let customers get started with BSM by identifying their application infrastructures and defining services, and then adopt Assurance to take more automated control.

BSM Availability pricing starts at about $100,000; BSM Assurance starts at twice that.