Managing OpenVMS

[Teijo Forsell]

Excuse me Mike, but could You elaborate this statement a little bit perhaps?:

"- BMC Patrol (Now owned by HP)"

I would surely like to know if we have bought Patrol. Would this perhaps be related to this announcement about the new OpenVMS native agent for Openview Operations?:

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/system_management_ovo.html


Regards,
Teijo

[Mike Naime]

Teijo:

I followed the link. I am not sure about this, but I do not think that it is the same as the BMC patrol software. While it sounds similar in function, I did see in the sales presentation that they called BMC on of the competitors. I will have to check with our Openview/Tools guy to see what he knows.

We are in the process of getting HP to install all of the modules/add-ons to Openview that we are even remotely interested in . I think that they want another testimonial out of this. :-)

We started with BMC patrol a couple of years ago. They have upgraded versions at least once that I am aware of. We even had BMC FTE's working at our site for at least a year. I'm not sure if they are still sitting back in operations or not. I know that we run several BMC consoles back in OPS due to the number of systems that we are monitoring. (Some local, some remote)

[Jens Mårtensson]

BMC Patrol is a competitor to HP (HP have not acquired Patrol).

If you have a homogeneous environment (read OpenVMS 7.3.1 and later 7.3.2) you could use the HP Native agent. If you have heterogeneous environment (OpenVMS 6 and above on VAX, Alpha and Itanuim) you could use AppMind that is an OpenView certified agent. During a transition phase from Patrol to OpenView you preferably use AppMind as it also supports Patrol.

Also, if you look at performance metrics, the native agent doen't do this and the Appmind agent does.

Regards,
Jens - In transition phase :o)

[Mike Naime]

I stand corrected. I was remembering a discussion some time back about a merger and hearing our tools guy talking about the 2 (Openview and Patrol) becoming a common toolset after that. I guess that it never happened.

[Mobeen_1]

If you are looking at remote management of your VMS systems, i would recommend that you use a product called "Unicenter Console Management for openVMS" from CA (Computer Associates). The details of this can be had at
http://www3.ca.com/Solutions/Product.asp?ID=1210

This product is no different from the old Polycenter Console Manager that most of us are used to :-)

If you are looking for some new product that would help you monitor, alert, perform recovery actions proactively for your OpenVMS systems as well as Oracle etc, then i would advise that you look at BMC Patrol. I have used this for quite some time and its good.

For monitoring OpenVMS systems running Oracle you basically need to run 2 agents/KM (referred to as knowledge modules) from BMC, the details of which are as follows
1. Patrol Agent for OpenVMS
2. Patrol Agent for Oracle

You can review the product list at http://www.bmc.com

regards
Mobeen