First of the web-based management technologies Houston, Texas-based BMC Software Inc’s been talking about for so long were finally announced yesterday as the Patrol Knowledge Module (KM) for Internet Servers and a Patrolwatch browser front end. They’re new options for BMC’s Patrol suite of management tools. The Internet KM can monitor web, proxy, mail, ftp, news and remote servers and supports Netscape, NCSA, CERN and Apache. Support for Microsoft Information Server follows next quarter. The Internet Server module is $1,000. Information from Patrol KMs, which are available to monitor all relational, hierarchical and object databases plus 16 applications, can be viewed from Patrol Consoles and other SNMP network management interfaces. A new Patrolwatch option allows administrators to view events from Netscape Navigator now and from Microsoft Internet Explorer in future. What it doesn’t do is provide the full management functionality of Patrol Consoles. Administrators can only monitor events, they can’t go in and change them from Patrolwatch as they can with other Consoles interfaces. BMC says it’s all down to net security considerations and that it will add other security mechanisms to Patrolwatch to provide full Consoles services in future. Patrolwatch costs $500. BMC claims the new products conform to web management specifications being developed by Microsoft, Cisco, BMC et al (CI No 2,958).
