PATROL® Overview Delivering a Single, Elegant Architecture

As companies leverage their computing resources to support their business-critical services, IT organizations are challenged with

In addition to these challenges, the IT organization must reduce costs while increasing efficiency.

Deployment of the PATROL solution from BMC Software enables companies to realize savings while addressing the growing challenges of their IT organizations, increasing productivity on both the technical and organizational levels.

The PATROL Solution

The latest version of the PATROL solution is delivered with a new forward-looking infrastructure. Its design and delivery results in a truly distributed management solution that creates a level of interoperability not previously available in the Enterprise Systems Management marketplace. To avoid the pitfalls of a monolithic, cumbersome architecture that often requires lengthy and costly implementation schedules, PATROL has maintained flexibility and extensibility through its ability to deploy and use only the technologies required to achieve immediate goals. Over time, through the careful blending of additional technologies, PATROL's level of interoperability will truly provide customers the value of Enterprise Systems Management in their environment.

The PATROL solution encompasses a series of major architectural and functional advances. It provides a foundation for PATROL products that deliver on BMC Software's commitment to Assuring Business Availability®. This strategy ensures that business applications are always

The PATROL architecture forms a basis for modular adoption and deployment of these capabilities. In doing so, PATROL brings together the existing PATROL product suites consistent with the needs of PATROL customers. The PATROL solution now brings products together as options of operational features within a common management standard.

By deploying the upgraded PATROL Agent through proven over-the-top methodology, all KM solutions, including those written by customers and other vendors, immediately realize the benefits of the PATROL version 7.x architecture and capabilities.

Retaining and extending PATROL strengths

The PATROL 7.x architecture retains and extends the key directions and components of the existing PATROL technologies as well as those of PATROL Perform/Predict and PATROL Enterprise Manager (PEM). The strengths of previous versions of the PATROL architecture continue with PATROL version 7.

An intelligent, autonomous agent

The PATROL Agent is a key component controlling the collection and management of data for the PATROL solution. The agent is responsible for discovering applications and the objects that PATROL represents as 'management points of interest'. The agent automatically monitors and evaluates the metrics of these objects, creates event messaging, aggregates information, and initiates corrective actions or notifications when appropriate. Since the PATROL Agent is intelligent and autonomous, a great deal of the work is done when and where the data is gathered, thereby reducing the load on the network. The ability to be intelligent and autonomous increases reliability and enhances the scalability, thus making the PATROL solution an integral part of any Enterprise Systems Management strategy.

Open architecture and multiple integration points

The PATROL solution integrates several disciplines in the Enterprise Systems Management strategy toward a common goal: “To insure our customers' business applications remain available and performing at peak efficiency”.

The PATROL product’s component-based architecture allows for seamless integration with other solutions and allows for easy extension of both the managed data and the cross-functional management tasks required within today's IT organizations. By using a common infrastructure, industry standards such as XML, SNMP, and standards-based APIs, PATROL keeps and enhances its open and extensible architecture. This strategy allows customers to add services satisfying their specific management functionality and integration requirements.

Highly scalable solutions

The PATROL solution delivers a scalable solution through the use of proven PATROL technologies. PATROL delivers the following protocols:

Publish-Subscribe protocol — This protocol sends information to the client application about only those objects that have been explicitly selected. Information about selected objects is communicated to PATROL services as Subscriptions.

Steady-state protocol — This protocol sends messages over the network only when

an abnormal condition exists within a PATROL service

a client application requests information from a PATROL service

a timed event occurs, such as a health check heartbeat; timed events can be disabled when desirable

Extending Management Strategies with PATROL (version 7)

The PATROL 7.x architecture enhances functionality, integration, capabilities, and compatibilities. Version 7 of the PATROL product provides significant improvements in the operational aspects of PATROL. All BMC Software solutions will offer greatly enhanced functionality as individual solutions take advantage of the new architecture.

Information Sharing and Communications

In this latest version of the PATROL solution, data is collected and stored in a global namespace. By storing data in this manner, collectors make basic data more widely available to consuming client applications. In a simple example, a collector posts availability data related to a specific application. A monitoring client application has the ability to 'Subscribe' to this data, analyze the data and take appropriate action, such as alarm, create an event message, or perform a notification.

The global namespace allows both local and remote access. Local access allows efficient analysis of the service's data at the same place and time the data is collected. Local access also enables the autonomous nature of the architecture to insure that remote clients and network availability do not impede the collection and evaluation of local information. Allowing remote access to this global namespace allows the namespace to act as a distributed virtual repository for any and all client applications wishing to Subscribe to the data available.

Both Publishers and Subscribers of the namespace data use the publish-subscribe model, an efficient protocol that maximizes data availability while minimizing network traffic. PATROL services (such as a PATROL Agent) publish collected and generated information; client applications subscribe to desired data from the global namespace. PATROL supports a form of publishing in which it is not necessary to physically move the actual data into the global namespace. Instead, PATROL maintains the location of information in the global namespace and the data is provided to the subscribing client application directly from the publishing service (i.e. the PATROL Agent service).

The publish-subscribe model greatly enhances scalability and allows client applications (Consoles) to subscribe to the subset of data and information desired, avoiding a continuous stream of information that may not be required or desired. This communication discipline

allows event-driven real-time use of data without the overhead of constant polling

enhances scalability by using a message routing process that manages communications between a client and one or more services

provides a topology that allows a client application to reach a large number of services simultaneously while requiring only a single network socket

provides real-time fail over capabilities, allowing the messaging layer to continue operation without reconfiguration or administrative intervention in the event of a component level communication problem

Centralized Management and Administration

In the PATROL solution, the management and configuration of the product and its users can be centrally managed and maintained.

Managing the Distributed services

PATROL Configuration Manager provides the ability to create, maintain, and deploy management configurations to all of the PATROL agents in the environment. It provides a repository and a drag-and-drop approach to updating configuration information related to the PATROL Agents and the application management information.

Administering Service Access and Client Application (Console) Users

The PATROL solution introduces a single point of management for Enterprise Systems Management administrators to control and manage the accessibility of PATROL Agent services. Capabilities include

Presentation Services

The PATROL solution extends the architecture to the data consumer layers. The consumer layer refers to the client applications within the PATROL product suite. The client application can be any form of management component that consumes PATROL data and performs management activities related to the information communicated.

The presentation layer in the newest version of PATROL consists of a delivery infrastructure and one or more optional service components. The presentation layer provides generic user interface components and services that can be used by multiple application specific optional service modules. These applications, or modules, use the interface services to provide specific business logic and functionality. The presentation layer, known as PATROL Central, is available as a Microsoft Windows application or as a Web server based product. When implementing PATROL Central - Web Edition, no client desktop application installation is required.

Summary

The latest version of the PATROL product delivers a flexible new architecture, thus Assuring Business Availability for Enterprise Systems Management. It provides a powerful foundation that will seamlessly support an ever-increasing array of capabilities from BMC Software.

Standardization and integration continue to be key benefits of the PATROL product suite. The managed systems benefit from consistent data collection and standardized configuration. The management views benefit from a centralized, integrated approach, supporting the sharing of many different views and common services.

This version of the PATROL product introduces major enhancements to the underlying infrastructure of PATROL. Its foundation powerfully supports multiple solutions. It brings together event management, availability management, and performance management while enhancing core values such as scalability, usability, and security.

Helping you maintain advantage

BMC Software Professional Services helps your company maintain its competitive advantage through a comprehensive suite of services that includes service level management consulting, installation, implementation, configuration, and customization. Our professional services and education offerings are designed to ensure the ongoing availability of critical business applications, maximize product potential, reduce project risk, deliver IT value to your business, and improve your operations. For more information about BMC Software Professional Services, visit http://www.bmc.com/profserv.

About BMC Software

BMC Software, Inc. [NYSE: BMC], is a leading provider of enterprise management solutions. The company focuses on Assuring Business Availability® for its customers by helping them proactively improve service, reduce costs and increase value to their business. BMC Software solutions span enterprise systems, applications and databases. Founded in 1980, BMC Software has offices worldwide and is a member of the S&P 500, with fiscal year 2002 revenues of approximately $1.3 billion. Visit http://www.bmc.com to learn more.

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