By now, you've probably seen the notification on the AppManager 8 release. We're excited that it is now generally available for customers current on maintenance to download and install. This is the most robust testing I've seen of any product in my career. We've always done beta testing on products, but that's typically done in a staging or test environment and isn't subject to the stresses that large production environments can put on a product. For this release we decided to go well past beta testing and performed a seven-month "controlled general availability" program with eight diverse AppManager customers, upgrading and running the 8.0 code in production. So all customers can now take advantage of AppManager 8 with the first service pack already included - hence the official version number 8.0.1. You might run into some of those customers already on AppManager 8 in the forums - ask what they think of it!
Beyond the extensive testing though, I'm excited about what this release has to offer you. I was visiting 
a Fortune 100 energy company last week, and the senior architect we met with said something that struck me. To paraphrase, he said that while they are working on better aligning to a service model for IT service delivery, they want to know the element monitoring tool is going to be a good fit when it's time to connect everything. Many of the IT organizations that I meet with are in a similar situation. They're working on organizing around service delivery, and while that is a focus, they still need to operate their applications and systems on a day-to-day basis.
We believe that AppManager 8 is your best choice for supporting your operations needs today, and with its open architecture, the future as well. We focused on customer feedback to simplify application and system management by moving Operator Console features into Control Center so you can centralize your management efforts. A major usability rewrite was put into Control Center to give it a fast and modern look and feel. We included self-health monitoring that not only tells you when an AppManager component isn't working, but suggests configuration improvements as well. Discovery is on steroids now with the new "Delta Discovery" feature that can be run as often as every 15 minutes with events you can use to either automate implementation of monitoring policy or trigger a change control process.
There's far too much new to cover everything in this post, but you can read up on all the new capabilities in the What's New paper on our web site. And check out the new AppManager HQ group where there is information to help you get started with AppManager 8, including a series of 5-minute How-To videos that cover the major new features.
Posted
Jan 31 2012, 01:45 PM
by
Travis Greene