Tango/04 Looks to the Enterprise with VISUAL Message Center 5.0

by Alex Woodie

Tango/04 Computing Group has introduced a new version of its flagship iSeries and Windows systems monitoring software, VISUAL Message Center. With Version 5.0, officials of the Spanish software company say that they have delivered a major release with dozens of features, including some you would normally expect to find in high-end systems management products like IBM Tivoli Management Framework and Hewlett-Packard OpenView, but with the OS/400-centric viewpoint that Tango/04 has traditionally offered.

VISUAL Message Center is composed of a central Windows-based-management component, called SmartConsole, and a dozen or so agents 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. The SmartConsole is continually receiving messages from the agents, monitoring events occurring on the network and on the server, and communicating that information to the systems administrator through a series of color-coded "business impact" maps, escalation lists, and notification features, via e-mail, pager, and cell phone.

Before this release, VISUAL Message Center was geared for monitoring events, performance issues, security breaches, or other application problems occurring on OS/400 and Windows servers. VISUAL Message Center 5.0 has the capability to receive messages from Unix and Linux platforms through the Linux/Unix Adapter, one of the optional agents that users can purchase and deploy.

Users should be able to grasp the significance of events more quickly with the graphical customization capabilities that Tango/04 has added to the business impact maps. With VISUAL Message Center 5.0, users can classify events into real-world objects like "printer," "router," or "Web back-end," and create a hierarchy among them, so that if a problem occurs with a router, for example, the user can see on the business impact map the other services it will affect.

Raul Cristian Aguirre, Tango/04's chief executive officer, says this new capability should help users quickly find the cause of problems. "Before this, you had hundreds or thousands of unrelated events, but it was very hard for the operator to know immediately where the problem resided or whether it required immediate attention," he says. "With our new Enterprise Views and Enterprise Mapping, analyzing root causes is as simple as viewing a map with color-coded icons."

Tango/04 has also enhanced event management with new knowledge management features in this release. Operators could always automate the execution of some common actions with VISUAL Message Center. With this release, processes that require manual intervention can be made easier to understand and more self-explanatory through links to documents in HTML, Word, or multimedia formats.

Scalability and resiliency have been improved in VISUAL Message Center 5.0, the company says. Additional improvements include the memory-resident events database and the Expression Analyzer that allow the product to process more than 700,000 business rules per second. In terms of resiliency, users will be able to avoid data loss, thanks to a new event buffer in its Secure Handshaking and SmartReconnect features.

Other noteworthy changes with this release relate to the escalation capability, a function that controls which events get bumped up in significance and who gets alerted to them. Enhancements also include additional reports, two new agents, 35 documented changes to the GUI, and a general increase in the level of automation with the product, company officials say.

Tango/04 CEO Aguirre says the improvements in VISUAL Message Center 5.0 bring it closer to the level of enterprise systems management products used in mainframe environments. "We are bringing that mainframe power to the iSeries IT department so they can control the overall status of their infrastructure, at any time, but with far less complexity, deployment time, and cost."

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