AmberPoint Introduces Management Pack to Enhance Web Services Capabilities of Microsoft Operations Manager

Web Services Management Leader Delivers Extensions to Microsoft Enterprise Management Solution

Microsoft Professional Developers Conference -- Los Angeles, October 29, 2003 -- AmberPoint, Inc., announced today that it is enhancing the integration between its industry-leading Web services management solutions and Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2000 with the addition of a new Management Pack module. MOM 2000, Microsoft Corp.’s leading enterprise management solution, provides enterprise monitoring, management and security for Windows-based systems. By implementing the AmberPoint Management Pack for MOM 2000, customers of both companies can achieve end-to-end management across their complete Web services environments, including Web services on both .NET and J2EE platforms.

Used in conjunction with AmberPoint Web services management solutions, AmberPoint's new extension will allow MOM 2000 to have greater control over the operational health of Web services applications and optimize the business value of loosely coupled systems. Enterprises can get a holistic, real-time view into their IT environments, automate crucial tasks, and align their IT goals with business objectives.

“Today’s heterogeneous Web services environments require advanced management capabilities to support business functions that span multiple enterprises,” said David Hamilton, director of the Enterprise Management Division at Microsoft Corp. “Microsoft is pleased to announce that we are working closely with AmberPoint, a leader in specialized Web services management, to ensure inclusion of functionality in Microsoft Operations Manager 2000 through integrated Management Packs, delivering our mutual customers best-of-breed management for heterogeneous environments.”

Microsoft provides basic Web services management through MOM, Windows Server 2003 and management instrumentation accessible via Visual Studio .NET. MOM Management Packs contain extensive operational knowledge for specific applications, data sources and information systems. Through AmberPoint’s new Management Pack and leveraging the MOM Connector Framework, AmberPoint solutions communicate bi-directionally with MOM 2000.

In other news, AmberPoint yesterday announced that a customized version of its management software will be distributed with the next version of Microsoft Visual Studio, code-named “Whidbey” (see “AmberPoint to Deliver Tools for Managing Web Services in Microsoft Visual Studio ‘Whidbey’”).

Bidirectional Communication
AmberPoint can relay critical Web service application events such as performance degradations, service level violations or availability errors to MOM. The AmberPoint Management Pack recognizes these events out of the box and leverages MOM’s awareness of the IT infrastructure to determine the root cause of the problem and initiate corrective actions such as clearing disk space, re-allocating database connections or rebooting a server. AmberPoint leverages the template capabilities in MOM 2000 to allow Operations staff the flexibility to customize the actions.

Alternatively, if MOM 2000 detects that a machine running a Web service has failed, it can automatically execute a command that reconfigures the appropriate AmberPoint agent to route all future requests to a machine running an alternate endpoint.

“By integrating closely with Microsoft Operations Manager, we can provide our customers with a single, global view of their distributed IT environments,” said John Hubinger, AmberPoint CEO. “By pairing AmberPoint and MOM, enterprises can maintain trustworthy, production-ready IT environments, gain a greater, more complete understanding of their IT landscapes, and more closely align IT resources with their business objectives.”

Comprehensive Management Capabilities
The combination of AmberPoint and MOM 2000 provides comprehensive management capabilities across the extended enterprise.

• Performance Monitoring: Through AmberPoint, MOM gains the ability to monitor the operational health of individual Web service operations, including performance threshold warnings as well as violations in service level agreements with customers.


• Availability Monitoring: AmberPoint can verify the availability and accuracy of any individual Web service operations based on SOAP faults or errors emitted by the service as well as network-level pings, and relay the information to MOM.


• Authorization and Access Monitoring: AmberPoint monitors the Web service environment for security violations and makes them visible in MOM, enabling intrusion detection and other security enforcements.


• Align IT and Business: Because it monitors the content of Web services requests and responses, AmberPoint can associate business relevance with events published to MOM 2000, allowing operations staff to determine the impact of those events. By providing finely segmented, real-time data to MOM 2000, AmberPoint enables organizations to dynamically allocate systems resources according to business priority. For example, IT staff can dedicate high-performance servers to the Web services processing the maximum dollar value of orders.


• Monitoring Heterogeneous Web Services: Because AmberPoint management solutions are based on an open, standards-based, agent-based distributed architecture and run natively on both Java- and Microsoft .NET-based Web service environments, AmberPoint enables MOM 2000 to monitor performance and availability of Web services that are built in any development environment, running on any platform and residing on either side of the corporate firewall, including Web services available via packaged applications. AmberPoint’s solutions are non-invasive and can be added at any time and without additional coding to the Web services themselves.


• End-to-End Monitoring: With MOM and AmberPoint, enterprises get visibility into not only the IT infrastructure, but also the real-time operational behavior of the Web services-based applications. By combining this information, AmberPoint and MOM are able to bridge the gap that has existed in traditional systems management of IT.

Product and company names herein may be trademarks of their registered owners.

Press Contacts:

Bob Dever
AmberPoint, Inc.
510.433.6553
bdever@amberpoint.com

Kim Abreu
Atomic Public Relations
415.553.4305
kim@atomicpr.com