Tango/04 Boosts BSM Capabilities of VISUAL Message Center

Published: November 14, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Tango/04 Computing Group recently launched VISUAL Message Center 7.0, a new version of its flagship systems management tool for i5/OS, Windows, Unix, and Linux, that offers significant new features in the area of business service monitoring (BSM). Tango/04 says the new BSM capabilities give IT administrators and business managers much more control over business processes, including how different processes affect one another.

Tango/04 introduced the BSM concept with the overhauled VMC 6.0, which it launched early last year. The company's goal with VMC 6.0 was to start bringing various IT management disciplines together, particularly the monitoring of IT infrastructure, applications, and business processes, with the aim of creating a more wholesome view of how these interdependencies affect service levels, and what steps administrators should take to alter or maintain those levels.

The key BSM element in VMC 6.0 was the introduction of the ThinkServer monitoring engine, a Windows-based application that not only receives the status data gathered by the range of deployed agents, but also generates agents (called "ThinAgents" by Tango/04). Another important element for BSM was the introduction of a new Web-based management console, called the Web SmartConsole, which complements (but does not replace) the traditional Windows-based SmartConsole application. Both SmartConsole applications gave managers graphical, color-coded representations of the current state of their IT infrastructures as they relate to their targeted service level agreement (SLA).

In VMC 7.0, Tango/04 has taken the BSM initiative a step forward with the introduction of the BSM Extension for SmartConsole. The BSM Extension gives IT managers a more powerful way to segregate status dependencies between processes and components, giving them "a very precise and realistic portrait of the IT infrastructure situation according to business priorities," the company says.

The key element in the BSM Extension that gives IT Manager this extra visibility into real-time status are the new "dependency rules" that Tango/04 has added to the product. In effect, these dependency rules let managers parse, with a much higher degree of confidence, the actual elements that make up their IT environments, so they don't have a "throw the baby out with the bathwater" reaction when something goes wrong.

Here's how the dependencies have been improved, according to Raúl Cristián Aguirre, Tango/04's CEO. "In the previous version of the SmartConsole, all the components had the same relevance regarding the processes or applications they supported," he writes in an e-mail exchange. "The worst component determined the status of the whole process. This meant that if the color-coded status icon of a single component turned to yellow or red because of a failure, the icon of the whole process or application turned red regardless of the actual impact of the component on the process, resulting in an inaccurate or misleading assessment of the situation."

For example, say a customer had a failing router. However, a given application may not be in imminent danger of failing, for a couple of reasons. First, the customer could have a second router waiting to back up the first. Or perhaps the router doesn't really play a role in a given process. "In these cases, the process should have stayed green or, at worst, turned yellow to highlight the existence of a problem that was not critical," Aguirre writes.

Four types of dependency rules are provided by the new BSM Extension in VMC 7.0, including: most critical component (sets a strong dependency); least critical component (sets a weak dependency); simple redundancy (flashes a red icon when 50 percent or more of the components in a process are critical); and a custom rule that lets users set up their own complex dependencies.

All of the new BSM capabilities are present in the Web SmartConsole. "It is a powerful tool especially for non-technical managers to see high level status dashboards (what we call Enterprise Views) from their PCs, no matter where they are," Aguirre writes.

Managers and operators should be able to trace problems more quickly with VMC 7.0 thanks to two new root-cause analysis capabilities. First, a user can get the details and history of an event, such as how much time a server has been down, by simply hovering his mouse over the icons in the SmartConsole. Secondly, Tango/04 has also added a new view to the status dashboard that lists the components that are causing the current state of the process.

The new release also brings new service level reports and business service availability reports that let IT shops track how well they're doing at keeping things running, and include information about failures, average downtime, service level compliance, worst components, and the most common causes of failure.

Also debuting with VMC 7.0 are new ThinAgents for monitoring IBM's WebSphere Application Server, Citrix Windows emulation environments, and Hewlett-Packard HP-UX operating systems. These agents join a group of ThinAgents that numbers in the hundreds and covers major operating systems, databases, middleware components, and some applications. "One of the main strengths of VISUAL Message Center is all the built-in knowledge that comes with its ThinAgents, preconfigured with values, variables and thresholds tested at customer sites worldwide," Aguirre writes.

VMC 7.0 is available now. Pricing for iSeries monitoring ranges from $9,000 to $18,000, while the typical mid size Windows environment with a single iSeries server will run about $10,000. For more information, visit www.tango04.com.

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