* Closer look at Panacya’s Service Center management software
While focused historically on e-business, Panacya has an architecture that can provide a useful analytics-centric, manager-of-managers role in many environments, while integrating with enterprise management consoles or software with more evolved business-oriented views.
Panacya can do much of the heavy lifting for business service management, and in the future should be able to capitalize on its architecturally neutral approach for more enriched visualization of business process impact.
The Panacya Service Center is structured around a three-tier architecture that works without dependencies on intelligent agents. The Panacya console supports user interfaces, semantic modeling, reporting and common services, and integrates out of the box with enterprise systems management products, along with Managed Objects, Remedy and Attention.
The Panacya Analytics Modules are at the heart of Panacya’s product. They analyze and raise alerts across a wide range of infrastructure components and ecosystems. Among the environments supported today are WebLogic, WebSphere, Apache, iPlanet, Internet Information Server, Windows, Solaris, Linux, Oracle, Sybase, MySQL, Cisco and Java Message Service. Panacya has made the Analytics Modules extensible to other components and environments through the Panacya Studio – which eliminates the need for scripting and which has received consistent praise from Panacya users.
Finally, Panacya’s data managers gather information from a variety of sources, ranging from SNMP, to log files and sockets, to Java Management Extensions, to XML and HTTP, to other management sources such as Keynote, BMC and Mercury.
Core to Panacya’s notion of “next-generation” design is that analytic priorities are applied at each stage, rather than importing mountains of data into a central database for painful and inefficient soup-to-nuts correlation. In other words, based on policies and context, data is analyzed, synthesized and prioritized even at the data-gathering stage. The result in terms of customer perception is a “lighter,” more efficient footprint.
Panacya is most appreciated for its extensibility, its integration with other products and of course its efficient analytic abilities, which can map infrastructure to business processes. Its Service Center is designed to help customers establish a more meaningful context for operational and service monitoring. For instance, Panacya has introduced a “Solution Pack” for messaging, linking Microsoft Exchange with other application services such as spam filters and virus scanners. Panacya has also been able to instrument its analytics to help a telecommunications provider measure phone activations, credit authorizations and ringtone downloads. Panacya’s analytics span performance, availability, optimization and security-related requirements.
Panacya’s Service Center is, however, not yet heavily focused on managing network infrastructure, in spite of its Cisco support, so it’s best as a complement to other network management tools. Panacya is relatively easy to deploy, given the richness of its functionality, but it does require meaningful investment in software and typically some customization. Enterprise Management Associates has seen accounts that are upwards of $200,000 for software, services and IT time. However, if you’re dealing with large or complex application environments, and you’re looking for an analytic system that’s designed with versatility, extensibility and business-related infrastructure alignment in mind, Panacya should be high on your list.
