Key benefits
- Reports events from a service perspective and before service levels are affected
- Reduces operator staffing requirements
- Consolidates enterprise operations management of networks, distributed technologies, mainframes, and non-standard systems
- Integrates event messages with trouble-ticketing systems and leverages existing management systems and solutions
- Pinpoints the root cause and service impact quickly through customized views
- Enriches event messages to accommodate a variety of staff skill levels
- Automates management and recovery actions
- Scales to the growth of the IT enterprise and reliably handles event bursts
- Integrates a variety of notification methods to communicate to the right person at the right time
Business challenge
- Reports events from a service perspective and before service levels are affected
- Reduces operator staffing requirements
- Consolidates enterprise operations management of networks, distributed technologies, mainframes, and non-standard systems
- Integrates event messages with trouble-ticketing systems and leverages existing management systems and solutions
- Pinpoints the root cause and service impact quickly through customized views
- Enriches event messages to accommodate a variety of staff skill levels
- Automates management and recovery actions
- Scales to the growth of the IT enterprise and reliably handles event bursts
- Integrates a variety of notification methods to communicate to the right person at the right time
The delivery of business services and the achievement of service level agreements has made centralized IT management more critical than ever.
While separate management domains can effectively control applications or segments of the enterprise infrastructure, there is no service correlation to show how specific domain performance affects the overall delivery of IT services.
IT staff need to pinpoint the source of problems quickly, determine the service level agreements impacted by a problem, and understand how an outage or slowdown affects the delivery of business services.
BMC Software solution
IT organizations can benefit by service management solutions and processes that
PATROL Enterprise Manager (PATROL EM) is the BMC Software service management and event automation solution.
PATROL EM consolidates events from across the IT enterprise, immediately pinpoints the source of application and infrastructure outages and slowdowns, and reports problems from the perspective of services, applications, and infrastructure.
In even the most complex IT environments, PATROL EM delivers a single pane of glass for a central point of management and control. This consolidation reduces the number of operators needed to manage the enterprise without reducing operations effectiveness.
PATROL EM helps IT operations meet service level agreements and deliver a high quality of service experience to end users.
Unparalleled event consolidation
Event consolidation allows fewer staff to manage more infrastructure without compromising the quality of operations. A powerful, technically flexible management tool, PATROL EM consolidates events across multiple local and remote geographic locations.
PATROL EM consolidates events from
- PATROL KMs, databases, applications, frameworks, network managers, and element management systems
- systems, networks, and devices, such as telecommunications equipment
- mainframes, including MVS, DB2, IMS, CICS, and other subsystems
- new and non-standard technologies, such as e-business applications and environment control systems
Powerful centralized command and control
Console consolidation allows fewer staff to manage more of the enterprise. PATROL EM supports console consolidation with an extensive array of built-in terminal emulators.
With PATROL EM, repair action can be as immediate as selecting an alert and accessing an affected system by launching a
With remote system access, operators can manually correct problems, or repair operations can be scripted and PATROL EM can automatically initiate the scripts.
PATROL EM also interoperates with the award-winning PATROL infrastructure management solutions and other solutions to leverage existing investments.
As a peer or wrapper solution, PATROL EM complements frameworks and network fault managers by
Versatile and comprehensive real-time service correlation
Quickly identifying an outage or a slowdown is not enough. Understanding how an outage or a slowdown relates to a service helps IT focus resources and avoid service level agreement breaches.
PATROL EM client operator applications include functions that can visually correlate how services are impacted by real-time problems. Graphical views, charts, queries, event logs, and Active Alert Displays (AADs) provide details about service-impacting events. PATROL EM offers Windows- and Web-based client operator applications.
Proactive service management best practices
By deploying PATROL EM to identify problems that affect service levels, Operations can take a proactive role in IT management.
Supported PATROL EM integrations aid service management best practices by
With these best practices in place, operator actions can be focused and prioritized from a service delivery perspective.
Flexible event message manipulation
PATROL EM supports an extensible palette of event message manipulation functions, including
These functions help organize, classify, streamline, and clarify the hundreds of thousands of exception messages that an enterprise can disburse every hour.
These value-added functions help IT
Blending service information into event messages helps even the least experienced operators rank the importance of enterprise problems to service level management objectives.
Instantaneous action at machine speeds
Built-in automation capabilities can be customized to eliminate slowdowns, downtime, and human errors. By scripting corrective actions, PATROL EM can automate launch-and-correct operations at machine speed upon detection of an event.
Automated responses can repair problems, escalate events, open trouble tickets, add service impact and weighting measures, and correlate and suppress sympathetic event messages.
Fast event notification and escalation
PATROL EM can initiate automated event notification and escalation for fast response to critical events. By integrating with common telephone-based communication methods, like paging, e-mail, and voice mail, problem notification is made instantly to the right staff at the right time.
If an initial notification goes unanswered, PATROL EM can escalate notifications to a broader group or management level to ensure fast repair action.
Securely manage services, applications, and technologies
PATROL EM can be configured to provide a secure management environment that protects event data as it flows across the network.
PATROL EM supports encrypted communications between itself and external processes. To secure system integrity, additional restrictions help fend against unauthorized access.
Operator connections to Windows-based PATROL Explorer outside the firewall ensures confidentiality through third-party encryption software. Standard HTTPS communications protect connections to browser-based PATROL Central Alerts - Web Edition. In addition, user access to data and commands is centrally administered.
For PATROL agent integration, built-in encryption options can be deployed.
Panoramic scalability that grows with your enterprise
IT enterprises are never static and are ever-expanding. Service demands grow with enterprise growth. PATROL EM is designed to handle the expanding management demands of an enterprise with a resilient, highly scalable, distributed architecture.
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 the 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.