Tango/04 Launches New Message Log Monitor

by Alex Woodie

Tango/04 Computing Group launched new event log monitoring software last week that automates the slow and tedious error-prone task of manually sorting through logs. The programmable Applications Agent can monitor the log of practically any application, uses filters to weed out unimportant entries, and consolidates the log data into a graphical console. When deployed with other components of Tango/04's VISUAL Message Center suite, administrators can receive immediate notification of critical errors or events by e-mail or pager.

The new Applications Agent is a plain-text file processor that continuously reads information from log files. When set up to monitor critical applications such as Web servers, firewalls, or databases, companies can receive immediate notification when something goes wrong, which should help them make better decisions and save money, says Raúl Cristián Aguirre, CEO of Tango/04, based in Barcelona, Spain.

"Companies waste millions of euros each year manually revising logs to determine problem causes," Aguirre says. "Our technology lets companies supervise their applications and systems in an unattended manner, avoiding errors and failures in their business processes and increasing their productivity and user satisfaction."

The Applications Agent is a component of Tango/04's VISUAL Message Center suite, which is composed of a central Windows-based-management component, called the SmartConsole, and a smattering of specific agent products that handle specific tasks in the data center, like OS/400 message monitoring, OS/400 security, OS/400 performance, and Windows NT/2000/XP event monitoring. Whereas the pre-existing agents in the VISUAL Message Center were targeted at operating-system level event logs and message queues, the new Applications Agent is designed to work with a variety of different applications.

Tango/04 says its Applications Agent can analyze millions of lines of log files a day, from many different applications, without impacting server and network resources. This level of performance is a result of the product's design, Tango/04 says, in which the monitor continuously reads log files incrementally, instead of periodically scanning the entire file.

Any OS/400, Windows, Unix, or Linux application can be monitored with the Applications Agent. Tango/04 includes several pre-defined agents for popular applications, including the Apache Web server, the Microsoft SQL Server database, and the Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server, a firewall and virtual private network (VPN) product.

Users set up the Applications Agent, which supports fixed-width log file fields, as well as delimited field formats, through the Windows console. The software uses a "regular expression-based" filtering engine to discern which data is not important and should be discarded, and which errors or events the user has deemed important. When the Application Agent detects a problem, the software interacts with other modules of the VISUAL Message Center monitoring solution to automate problem resolution, to notify the appropriate person, or to create a registry of the incident. The software also generates reports in various formats.

Several Tango/04 customers in Europe are already using the Applications Agent, including Ersel, an Italian company, and Pierre Fabre and Aviva insurance, both in Spain. A company in Belgium is using the Application's Agent to monitor an e-commerce Web site hosted on IBM's WebSphere application server. Tango/04 says the company was unable to fine any other product that could cope with the volume of traffic generated by Web site, and today it receives instant notification of any suspicious event, or even "404-page not found" errors, via Short Messaging Server (SMS) or e-mail. For more information, go to www.tango04.com.