Tango/04 Supports Unix and Linux with VISUAL Message Center

Published: March 23, 2006

by Alex Woodie

OS/400 shops that rely on Tango/04 Computing Group's VISUAL Message Center software to monitor and manage their OS/400 and Windows environments may be interested to hear that the Spanish software house has added support for the Unix and Linux operating systems.

Last week's introduction of new agents for Linux, AIX, and Solaris servers or logical partitions (in the case of Linux and AIX on the iSeries server) is the latest in a string of new features and capabilities Tango/04 began adding to its flagship VMC suite about 15 months ago, when it redesigned the product's architecture around the Windows-based ThinkServer Engine, a series of ThinAgents for OS, database, middleware, application, and network monitoring, and the Web-based SmartConsole interface, and unveiled its business service management (BSM) strategy (see "Tango/04 Delivers Affordable BSM, or 'Tivoli for the Rest of Us'").

Tango/04 says VMC users can capture and monitor any server-related metric that can be retrieved using a command, including file system usage, load average, CPU usage, jobs with abusive CPU consumption, number of processes, utilization of physical and virtual memory, processes per user, and virtual memory. The company offers specific ThinAgents for Linux, AIX, and Solaris, while other Unix variants can be monitored using a generic Syslog Thin Agent. Another agent for HP-UX is in development, the company says.

The announcement widens the scope of IT systems Tango/04 and its customers can monitor in real-time from the SmartConsole and its assortment of graphical dashboards, screens, and pre-configured graphs. The new support also bolsters the company's auditing story, as the ThinAgents can feed data into a number of preconfigured charts and reports for the purposes of monitoring availability to meet SLA requirements and regulatory compliance initiatives.

"IT infrastructures are increasingly heterogeneous, and as a result, there is a growing need to monitor all the diverse technological components that support business services from a single management console," says Raul Christian Aguirre, chief executive of Tango/04, which is headquartered in Barcelona, Spain, and which will soon be opening an office in the United States.