14 DAY TRIAL // Raleigh, North Carolina-based Red Hat has recently announced the release of an update to its Command Center remote monitoring package. According to its officials, Red Hat aims to make the Command Center a software-as-a-service approach to monitoring its Linux operating system and associated technologies.
The Command Center was first released in January 2003 and it features an intuitive web-based UI with customizable views for remote management. It is able to deal with systems and platforms such as Linux, FreeBSD, Sun Solaris, Windows,VMWare ESX as well as a variety of applications (JBoss, Apache, Tomcat, MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL, Microsoft Exchange).
Coming along with other Red Hat services such as Network Hosted, Network Satellite or JBoss Operations Network services, this product provides update, management, and provisioning capabilities for Red Hat's Enterprise Linux, Directory Server, and Application Stack, as well as third-party Red Hat Exchange applications. It is designed mostly as a low product cost requiring no additional software, setup, training, IT support or maintenance costs and neither dedicated servers or databases. It automatically alerts the administrators of current or impending system failures.
According to Red Hat the Command Center offered as a service is quicker, easier, and less expensive than traditional software implementations. Therefore the customers can get major benefits in rapid deployment, reduced costs, ease of use, and lower risks, with little loss of control and customizations. Red Hat Command Center also supports website monitoring from within as well as from outside the customer's network. Command Center monitors all aspects of IT services: websites (URLs), website performance or use (transactions), servers, hardware-like routers and firewalls, and applications like databases and mail server. One of the main parts of the Command Center would be the so-called Scout, which is a hardware device installed on-site which collects monitoring information for hosts and URLs.