Linux vendor Red Hat is revising its remote-monitoring
capability in an updated offering. Red Hat Command Center is a hosted
offering that provides remote monitoring of IT infrastructure servers and
applications.
The new version gets additional monitoring capabilities as
well as a new pricing structure, as Red Hat grapples with competition from
Oracle and others trying to manage systems remotely.
“Red Hat Command Center is a hosted service, not an on premises software
offering,” Donald Fischer, vice president of online services at Red Hat, explained to internetnews.com. “For the subset of services that require a
lightweight local agent to be installed on the system in order to enable
monitoring, that agent is implemented with standard open source
technology.”
The new version of Command Center includes new application monitoring probes
for the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 release, as well as JBoss 4 and
Oracle 10g. Red Hat Command Center can also manage Apache HTTP and Tomcat
servers, as well as network services, such as DNS
It’s not just about monitoring Red Hat Linux installations, either. Command
Center has support for monitoring Microsoft Windows, Sun Solaris and VMWare
ESX platforms.
In addition to more monitoring capabilities, Red Hat has changed the pricing
model for Command Center. Instead of multiple offers and prices, Red Hat now
has a $192 per year subscription for monitoring unlimited services on a server
with free up/down monitoring for all systems on a network with the purchase of
one system subscription.
Fischer noted that small enterprise and SMB customers are Red Hat’s target
for Command Center. They are also going to go after hosting and managed
service providers.
Red Hat hinted earlier this year that a new online offering was in the works. Command
Center is considered to be complementary to Red Hat’s overall management
efforts, including its Red Hat Network, which does Enterprise Linux
management.
Competitors of Red Hat, including Oracle, have upped the ante in the
management game this year. In January Oracle expanded its Enterprise Manager product to provide support for managing
Oracle and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
