Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

Network monitoring and management systems have historically been the realm of large companies with diverse IT departments, or of midmarket shops aggressively striving for "lights out" automation. A young Atlanta software company, PerformanceIT, is trying to change all of that, with ProIT, an affordable network management system the company says compares to IBM's Tivoli, Hewlett-Packard's Open View, and BMC Software's Patrol, while costing less than $25,000. The company last week announced ProIT 2.5, which brings new support for OS/400 servers.

ProIT is a Windows-based Dell PowerEdge 1650 rack-optimized server appliance that sits on a LAN and provides multi-level monitoring of servers, application processes, databases, and networking gear. The product gathers and analyzes data according to industry best practices, and anything outside of pre-set ranges triggers alarms, which can be delivered over a phone, e-mail, or a pager. Its core monitoring functionality is rounded out with a trouble-ticket system for tracking problems to resolution.

In addition to identifying performance problems as they occur, ProIT tracks the performance trends of applications and networks over time, and includes capacity planning features that are useful when making upgrade sizing considerations. The software includes several preconfigured reports for tracking availability, health status, and network and Web site traffic, and comes with a reporting engine for creating customized, 3-D graphs. Both administrators and users interact with the ProIT system through a Web browser.

With the release of ProIT 2.5, PerformanceIT offers additional agents, or what it calls Event Threshold Action modules, to report back to the core Network Management Station appliance. Readers of Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition, would be most interested in the Event Threshold Action module for iSeries, which is preconfigured to look for certain events and to recommend appropriate responses to them once they exceed certain thresholds (based on PerformanceIT's best practices information for the OS/400 server). Other new Event Threshold Action modules are available for the iPlanet application server and for Check Point Software Technologies' firewall software running on a server.

ProIT 2.5 also includes a new optional Intrusion Detection System, which tracks network-based threats according to their IP address, their target, and the number of attacks detected. This release also brings the new WebTrans Module for monitoring Web site availability, for compliance with service level agreements. New configuration wizards also help setup the monitoring of servers, devices, and operating system logs.

With the release of ProIT 2.5, the following operating environments, databases, and application servers are supported: OS/400, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Windows, Notes, Exchange, Apache, Tomcat, WebSphere, WebLogic, DB2, SQL Server, Oracle, Progress, and Ariba applications. Event Threshold Action modules are also available for network devices from 3Com, Cisco Systems, and Nortel Networks; for Check Point firewalls; and for any SNMP- or syslog-compliant device.

Michael Mittel, PerformanceIT's president and chief executive, says the company experienced significant growth during the second half of 2002, primarily because of ProIT 2.0. "We understand how critical it is to continue exceeding our customers' expectations, so we invested a significant amount of time and effort in our new ProIT release," he says.

Mittel says ProIT is aimed at small and midsized businesses with relatively high IT requirements but not a lot of staff to meet them. Such a shop would have five to 10 servers, or maybe more, and less than 10 people to run them, he says. Installation of the core ProIT NMS appliance takes about two days, with full implementation complete in under a week, according to the company.

There are some fairly large businesses using the six-year-old company's software, including British Telecom, SunMaid, and AT&T. Midmarket companies listed as PerformanceIT customers include Ivy Animal Health, an Overland Park, Kansas, manufacturer of beef cattle growth hormones; eAttorney, an ASP of services to the legal community; and DRS Technologies, which manufacturers electronics for the military.