BMC Patrol Express Upgrade To Monitor Web Performance

Patrol Express 3.0, which adds capabilities to monitor Web transaction performance, is BMC's "lightweight solution" for small and mid-size customers or branch offices of large enterprises, said Brandon Whichard, product manager for Patrol Express at BMC, Houston. The software is scheduled to ship early next month.

With the upgrade, Patrol Express can create synthetic Web transactions to measure the performance as it would be seen from the customer point of view, he said.

Patrol Express uses standard network protocols instead of agents to collect data on the systems it monitors, Whichard said.

"It's agentless, so you don't have to touch every system you want to monitor," he said.

Solution providers can sell the technology or use it to provide remote network monitoring services.

By implementing Patrol Express, Alvaka Networks was able to consolidate and replace five other tools in its managed services infrastructure, said Oli Thordarson, president of the Huntington Beach, Calif.-based solution provider.

"The energy we no longer have to put into managing all of those tools %85 has been directed toward improving sales and service quality to our customers," Thordarson said. As a result, the company has seen a 57 percent increase in sales of its managed services, he said.

Alvaka Networks has been "eagerly awaiting" Patrol Express' new Web transaction monitoring capabilities because they will help highlight performance issues that sometimes go undetected by infrastructure management alone, Thordarson said.

"You can monitor hardware performance statistics, and everything looks great. Then the customer calls you all ticked off because something's not working, even though everything looks green," he said.

Pricing for Patrol Express starts at $15,000 for the central management component, plus an additional fee for each monitored element. Monitoring for servers costs $400 each, monitoring for network devices costs $100 each and monitoring for applications costs $800 each, BMC said.

BMC on Monday plans to release its first-quarter financial results. Earlier this month, BMC cut its earnings projection for the quarter to 1 cent to 4 cents per share, down from its previous estimate of 5 cents to 10 cents per share.