AppManager 7 Reaches Out to Manage Virtual Machines, VOIP

Published: March 28, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The NetIQ division of Attachmate continues to expand the usefulness of its AppManager systems management tool, and with AppManager 7, announced yesterday at the Microsoft Management Summit in Houston, Texas, the company is rolling out a tool that has much more useful and intuitive graphical features and which can be used to monitor and manage virtual servers and new applications such as VOIP.

The original AppManager was launched back in 1996, in the wake of Microsoft's Windows NT 4.0 launch and its delivering of the BackOffice application suite, which included the SQL Server database, the Exchange Server email server, the IIS Web server, and a number of other tools, somewhat integrated and bundled for a discounted price. What Microsoft did not have at the time, however, at least as far as NetIQ was concerned, was a tool to monitor Windows and this software stack in a manner that IT shops were used to with mainframe, minicomputer, and Unix systems.

Today, Attachmate has over 6,400 AppManager customers, which is a little more than half of all NetIQ customers and which has about 360,000 licenses in the field. The product has evolved such that the AppManager Suite of tools can reach out from a single Windows-based server and manage as many as 30,000 Windows, Unix, or Linux servers from a single pane of glass, says Travis Greene, Attachmate's chief service management strategist for the AppManager Suite; each server can, in turn, manage myriad network devices and applications, and it is safe to say that AppManager is hooked into tens of millions of devices and applications worldwide.

With AppManager 7, Attachmate has added extensions to monitor and manage network devices and various layers of software out there in the Big Gray Cloud. Specifically, AppManager 7 can reach out to manage VMware's ESX Server virtual machine hypervisor, Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration software and Exchange Server 2007 databases, Oracle's 10g databases, Research In Motion's BlackBerry Enterprise Server, and VOIP applications from Cisco Systems and Nortel Networks.

Aside from the extensions to reach out into these programs and bring them under the control of AppManager, the latest release has a number of other enhancements. One of the most interesting ones is the ability for AppManager to sniff out networks and bring new servers under its control, based on policies set by administrators. This means that servers cannot sneak on the network, cause problems as companies deploy applications on them, and then be a surprise to administrators who are unaware that the machine exists at all. AppManager 7 scans networks every five minutes by default, looking for IP addresses, ActiveDirectory instances, and other server identifiers and then uses its rules to bring them into the fold. The agents to accomplish this integration can be deployed without human interaction as well, and upgrading existing agents is also done transparently. The software also now has policy exceptions for management job parameters, offering finer-grained control of what AppManager is and is not supposed to do in particular situations.

Attachmate has rejiggered the service mapping screens in AppManager that allow alerts to be organized in a number of different ways--a high level view across geographically distributed data centers, or a view based on the servers under management by a single administrator. By allowing these views to be reconfigured, it means that admins are not just confronted by a zillion red blinking words. Because, let's face it, on a modern network, there are always a bunch of things all going wrong or asking for attention. A good management tool can sort the real problems from issues that can be resolved later, and presents them in a coherent manner.

AppManager 7 runs on Windows boxes and costs $600 per Windows, Unix, or Linux server that it manages. It is available now.

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