Enterprise Application Management with PATROL

Spuler, David A.; Spuler, David

ISBN 10: 0130136794 ISBN 13: 9780130136794

Publisher: Prentice Hall, 1999

Synopsis

Discusses application management as a discipline and explains PATROL as a solution, for IT personnel, administrators and implementors, developers, operators, analysts, and instructors. Tells how to identify and prioritize enterprise application management problems and implement solutions across the entire application infrastructure, and offers specific techniques for managing each leading enterprise application and database. Includes a complete application management case study. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

About this title

About the Author

DR. DAVID A. SPULER is the Director of Advanced Research in BMC Software's Corporate Development division. Formerly as PATROL architect, he has been in the enterprise management industry since the beginnings of Application Management as a discipline, and was a member of the original PATROL development team. He is author of C++ and C Tools, Utilities, Libraries, and Resources: Free and Commercial Software Tools (Prentice Hall PTR).

From the Back Cover

Revolutionary Application Management solutions for today's mission-critical applications.

Enterprises are trusting their survival to mission-critical applications from companies like SAP, Baan, PeopleSoft, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and Lotus. These applications must be managed as professionally as the underlying hardware and network infrastructure. That's what Application Management is about - and David Spuler's Enterprise Application Management with PATROL® is the first comprehensive guide to this new discipline.

You'll discover how to identify and prioritize enterprise application management problems-and implement solutions across the entire application infrastructure, for maximum effectiveness. You'll also master BMC's PATROL, the world's #1 end-to-end Application Management system. Coverage includes:

* Defining an architecture for managing availability, event generation, problem detection, performance and service levels
* Integrating application instrumentation standards, including SNMP and WBEM
* Specific techniques for managing each leading enterprise application and database
* Developing PATROL Knowledge Management modules and extending PATROL to in-house applications
* A complete Application Management case study: The BMC Enterprise PATROL Center

No matter which enterprise applications you use-or your role in managing them-Enterprise Application Management with PATROL® can help you achieve unprecedented levels of performance and reliability.

From the Inside Flap

Preface

Application management is a state-of-the-art management concern. It is about bringing the art of management up to the high-level application layer and managing at that level instead of at the hardware or network infrastructure layer. Over time, Information Technology (IT) management has gone through various levels of sophistication from network management and systems management to the higher level of application management. By leveraging this higher level, many IT organizations are reaping the returns of a more structured approach to managing their applications.

This book is about application management as a discipline and also about PATROL as an existing solution. I have separated the more theoretical aspects of the discipline from the practical details of the PATROL product. For example, two chapters discuss architecture, one from a mostly theoretical point of view, and one covering PATROL architecture in detail. Certainly, other products offer application management functionality, but my belief is that PATROL is the best solution available today. This book is very much a book about PATROL, and I do not attempt to cover any other products that play in the application management arena.

This work showcases how the various pieces of PATROL fit together to allow you to achieve the advantages of advanced application management through PATROL. While offering a high level of flexibility, PATROL is also a large product suite with many components, and this book demonstrates how each piece can be used to complement others.

PATROL can be a very rewarding product to learn. Extending its capabilities is a quick and easy task that can show quick returns for your efforts. The open architecture allows PATROL to easily be applied to places where it is needed and adds value. Although the broad set of off-the-shelf products allow quick solutions for the most common IT needs, the customizability of PATROL is where it truly shines. Taking PATROL that little bit further can provide tremendous payoff by automatically detecting and correcting the site or machine-specific problems that beset you through the working day.

Who This Book Is For

This book addresses a number of different readership roles. The discussion of the theoretical aspects of application management as a management discipline should be interesting to all industry readers.

IT Personnel. Application management is a discipline that should be of interest to anyone involved with the management of software applications in a corporate environment.

CIOs and IT Managers. As the manager of an IT organization, you know only too well the pain of managing diverse applications. This book examines the implementation of application management to achieve relief through a more proactive approach. There is also information for defining the advantages of application management to help justify it to senior executives who may be less familiar with the technical details.

IT Architects. This book shows what the goal should be and allows IT architects and planners to best decide how to plug PATROL into the management scheme to get the best value. Application management is a discipline that affects the entire IT organization. Full leveraging of the advantages of application management involves careful planning, implementation, and often development efforts that consider application management during the development of in-house business applications.

Administrators and Implementers. Administrators and implementers will find the discussion of the deployment or implementation aspects of PATROL useful. I have covered the theoretical aspects of application management implementation as a general problem, and also the practical aspects of PATROL implementation. There is coverage of issues such as configuration, distribution, pager/email notification, SNMP trap notification, and integrations with other software components.

Developers. Developers and advanced IT administrators will find the various discussions of how to write a Knowledge Module and how to integrate with PATROL useful material. In-house application developers will find the discussion of how to instrument the application to make it more management-friendly a thought-provoking discussion. Developers of commercial applications or development tools should consider adding application management capabilities for their associated benefits to their applications or toolsets.

Operators. Operators can benefit from a deeper understanding of the PATROL product and the overall value of their place in application management procedures. However, this book is not really tutorial in nature and assumes that the details of PATROL are learned from another source such as the documentation or a training course.

Analysts. The topic of application management has been a hot area of research by technology industry analysts. Many of their papers have offered ideas and are cited in the bibliography. This book should give back some interesting viewpoints on the theory and practice of application management.

Instructors. An innovative course on application management would be highly useful for students as they enter the workplace.

Application management is a topic that touches many job roles in the IT organizations. This book offers something for everyone to whom application management is important.

This is the first book on PATROL. In fact, I believe it is the first book on application management as a discipline. I am pleased to bring you a book on the topic that has filled my life for the last several years and I trust you will enjoy it.

Edition details

• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0130136794
• ISBN 13: 9780130136794
• Binding: Textbook Binding
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 512