Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

Most application monitoring systems on the market today use server-side programs, or agents, to keep tabs on a variety of different servers. Silas Technologies took a different route in developing Silas Reveille, the application monitoring system it introduced in 2001. The centralized monitoring technique in Silas Reveille uses a technology called Synthetic Application Snippets, which goes out and directly tests an application, a process the company claims speeds processing and deployment. With Reveille 2.1, the company has concentrated on enhanced ease of deployment.

As the big system vendors like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and Microsoft continue to make their case for simplifying IT administration through a mixed bag of advanced, futuristic-sounding capabilities--such as "autonomic computing," "policy-based management," "root-cause analysis," and "self-healing" technology--application monitoring is becoming a more tangible first step that companies can take to get a leg up on proactive administration and service-level-assurance mandates, instead of continually reacting to unforeseen events.

Silas Reveille helps companies to keep track of the state of their applications and to alert administrators, via e-mail or pager, when something goes wrong. The software supports a range of platforms, including OS/400, mainframe, CICS, Unix, Linux, and Windows, with its centralized Synthetic Application Snippets, or SynAppS, technology. The SynAppS technology basically duplicates the input that a user or another application would provide to the monitored application, and evaluates the application's response in terms of availability, response time, and data integrity.

The software has the capability to point to specific problems and to alert specific users to those problems. This could lead to a swift resolution through the use of several canned graphical charts, such as the Service Level Calendar and the Downtime by Resource graphs, or by drilling down into logs for greater detail. But sometimes it will be necessary to perform additional tests, and Reveille is geared to help administrators set up tests to further identify and tune the application. The software allows tests to be performed at different levels of granularity, and provides administrators with different levels of feedback. At the high level, this feedback could come in the form of "this transaction cannot be performed." At the lowest level, this feedback could result in a message such as "memory utilization on SQL database server is above threshold."

Silas claims that its centralized approach to application monitoring has advantages over the agent-based approach. Because agents require code to be installed, maintained, or sometimes replaced on the monitored server, it adds another layer of complexity, requiring programmers and more tools and lengthening the roll-out and time-to-value, according to the company. However, Reveille's centralized approach doesn't completely remove all configuration requirements for specific operating systems, which is one area of enhancement in Silas Reveille 2.1.

With Silas Reveille 2.1, the company has further refined the installation process by allowing Reveille to automatically determine the appropriate settings and operating system parameters upon installation, which will help customers to avoid making configuration errors, the company says. This release also features what Silas calls a "more seamless way" to test and monitor OS/400, mainframe, and Windows-based applications.

Reporting and analysis has also been improved with Silas Reveille 2.1, including quicker access to detailed application and component response times, and the capability to access application data in both graphical and table formats. A specific fix has been made for the monitoring of Captiva batch workloads, and there is also a new installation wizard for setting up monitoring of Documentum servers. Reveille is proving popular as a monitor of document management and imaging systems, which are two areas where Silas Technologies has extensive experience. In fact, the Winston-Salem, North Carolina, company's other product, besides Reveille, is an image archiving system.

Silas has gained traction with Reveille among financial services and health insurance companies in the South, including Blue Cross Blue Shield, of South Carolina, and Wachovia, the financial services giant in Charlotte, North Carolina. Indeed, Reveille was originally developed by a group of business executives at Wachovia, which, Silas officials say, shows that Reveille is a mature product for its age.

Silas Reveille 2.1 is available now. Pricing ranges from $75,000 to $300,000. For more information, go to www.silastechnologies.com.