Heroix this week made available an updated version of its flagship Longitude management software that the company says will give customers more tools to manage Windows events, troubleshoot in real time and provide performance reports to management.

Longitude Version 4 expands on Heroix's integrated approach to managing and collecting data from servers, operating systems, applications, routers and switches. The software, which runs on Microsoft Windows, Unix and Linux platforms, provides a central monitoring console, which Heroix says will help IT managers with distributed deployments.

"We have consolidated the product and its event-log capabilities. When a customer receives an event from Longitude, the information and settings from the alert are right there in front of them and they can drill down to troubleshoot across platforms and departments," says Ken Leoni, vice president of technical services at Heroix.

Longitude is installed on a dedicated server and uses industry-standard APIs to collect data from the machines it manages. The product monitors more than 250 performance metrics and generates 125 reports on system health. IT managers set up role-based administration and log on to the Web-based interface from any location to check performance with a user ID and password.

Heroix also upgraded Longitude Version 4 with dashboard capabilities that let customers collect defined sets of metrics from systems, applications and network devices. The dashboard can be customized with specific thresholds and performance measures across servers, databases, e-mail and Web components, Heroix says.

"Anything Longitude collects can be leveraged in this dashboard, and it really can speed troubleshooting to have all the elements in one, real-time view," Leoni says.

Longitude, which competes with products from Mercury Interactive (now part of HP), BMC Software  and Microsoft Operations Manager, now has a feature dubbed SNMP Studio, which the company says expands its network device-monitoring capabilities. With SNMP Studio, the software monitor devices such as firewalls, routers and switches by importing Management Information Bases.

The company enhanced Longitude’s reporting capabilities with a portal feature that lets IT managers create reports for line-of-business managers and implement policies to ensure users are presented only with data they are authorized to view. Heroix also provided consolidated Windows event logs in this release, meaning Windows application-, security-, and system-event logs can be aggregated and viewed in one place.