Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition--BMC Streamlines Access to Performance Data

BMC Software is shipping new utilities for mainframes and OS/400 servers that make it easier to access and view performance data collected by other BMC products on those platforms. PATROL for iSeries-Perceive and MAINVIEW Perceive let company employees who don't have access to BMC's performance tools view performance reports in a Web browser, which, BMC says, helps companies manage information technology more like other closely watched business processes.

PATROL for iSeries-Perceive and MAINVIEW Perceive (for mainframes) are small components of BMC's sprawling Enterprise Performance Assurance suite, which includes nearly 20 performance tools for a variety of operating systems, database management systems, and applications. But they are important components, nonetheless, because they bring the core OS/400 and mainframe performance data, collected by other BMC modules, to a common place that's easily accessible with a Web browser.

PATROL for iSeries-Perceive works with BMC's three other systems management and performance data collection modules for the OS/400 platform. These other BMC products are PATROL for AS/400, a system monitoring tool that also offers event escalation; PATROL for AS/400-Perform, which provides analysis for past and present OS/400 workloads; and PATROL for iSeries-Predict, a capacity planning tool that extrapolates performance data into the future and provides "what if" analysis. (PATROL for iSeries-Predict is the replacement for the BEST/1 capacity planning tool, which the company codeveloped with IBM and started shipping about a year ago. See "BMC Ships New Capacity Planning Tool for iSeries" for more information.)

With BMC's latest utility for the iSeries, users can tap into OS/400-resident performance data collected by the PATROL, Perform, and Predict products, and can view that data on a Web browser, through a collection of canned or customized reports. The software also lets users export that data in Excel, PDF, and XML formats with a single click of the mouse, BMC says.

The Perceive product has several benefits for users, says Dave Wagner, BMC product director for the Enterprise Performance Assurance suite. "Traditionally, the performance group sits down and creates a series of reports that provide automated reporting and publishing" of the performance data collected, he says. "The problem is, IT goes through the work but doesn't don't know if people are reading the reports. The reports don't really meet the needs."

When those reports fail to deliver the right goods to the right person at the right time, those people start to harass the IT administrator. "I was in a meeting with a customer who was paged or called 14 times, by people asking him to provide a variety of ad-hoc info to a bunch of constituencies, including the database administrators, the help desk, the line-of-business manager," Wagner says. "They say, 'I need to know what's going on with this server at that time.' "

An alternative solution to this problem might be to install the client portion of BMC performance tools on each of their desktops, but that's not such a good idea, because it requires extensive training and is somewhat risky, Wagner says. "You don't want to give a database administrator access to a performance console," he says.

PATROL for iSeries-Perceive (like the other Perceive products for Windows, Unix, Linux, and mainframe) can help to alleviate these problems by enabling self-service access to this data. Another benefit of Perceive, Wagner says, is its cross-platform nature; it's completely Web-based and its only requirement is an Apache Tomcat Web application server. The software is fairly lightweight, in that it does not store anything on the iSeries. Its only capability is to access the information and data stores of the other BMC products.

OS/400 support with the Perceive product was originally scheduled to ship during the spring of 2003, but BMC delayed the release to incorporate several other capabilities, like support for mainframe (through MAINVIEW Perceive) and support for the ERP applications, including those from Oracle, SAP, and Siebel Systems, as well as IBM's WebSphere.

BMC's OS/400 offerings, when it comes to performance data, are now on par with its Unix and Windows offerings, Wagner says. "You need a common view across all of these platforms," he says. "The iSeries is an excellent platform for Web services. It's being used increasingly as a key component of infrastructure beneath Web services, but it needs to plug and play better into the management systems."

PATROL for iSeries-Perceive is available now. Pricing is tier-based and starts at $80 for P05. For more information, go to www.bmc.com.