Systems that aim to ease administrative headaches in client-server environments populated a good number of the stands at Oracle Expo last week in Paris. Some of the offerings presented included Houston, Texas-based BMC Software Inc’s Patrol, Farmington Hills, Michigan-based CompuWare Corp’s EcoTools version 2.1 and Groupe Bull’s Integrated System Management version 3.0. Patrol is an event-activated automated management tool for distributed environments that comprises a graphical console and server agents. The agents supervise the state of the computers, resources, databases and applications in a networked environment, reporting on a variety of problems, including processor and database bottlenecks or poorly optimised applications.
Patrolink
The agents manage events automatically, notifying the console of the state of various objects and alerting users to problems that the agents cannot handle. It is available on 16 different distributed operating systems, from Bull’s BOS to Sun’s Solaris and all four Digital Equipment Corp operating systems. BMC specialises in large system administration and also showed Patrolink, which enables Patrol to alert network administrators to problems arising on other networks. It can link HP OpenView, IBM NetView for AIX, Sun NetManager and Polycenter Manager for NetView. CompuWare presented EcoTools 2.1, which integrates proxy agents that enable the identification of problems in production systems: EcoPMON, a process controller for Oracle under Unix evaluates the quantity of resources consumed and Command Line Interface so enabling a remote terminal to stop and start database and network control agents. Bull and its new partner, Cupertino, California-based Tandem Computers Inc showed Integrated System Management version 3.0 with its Integrated System Management for Databases and ISM Security Services modules. The database module includes DB*Monitor, which enables supervision and stop and start for distributed databases, and DBA Expert, which covers configuration management, rights to access, performance management, schematic management and data reorganisation. Organisers of the Oracle Expo in Paris reported 8,500 preregistrations, double the number in 1993.
