BEA CEO Alfred Chuang is scheduled to announce the Guardian project Tuesday at the company's BEAWorld user conference in San Francisco. Guardian is made up of lightweight agent software and a console that alerts users to potential problems like configuration errors, security vulnerabilities and defects that haven't been patched, said Todd Chipman, BEA's senior director of marketing. It will be included at no additional cost to users' existing support and maintenance contracts, beginning in December.
"We can actually provide a recommendation and resolve a problem before the customer in some cases is even aware of it," Chipman said.
Octavio Galindo, an IT consultant at Grupo Financiero Banamex, a Mexico-based financial services firm and a subsidiary of Citigroup Inc., said he estimates that Guardian will allow him to reduce by 75% the time he dedicates to monitoring for needed upgrades and patching his company's 25 installations of BEA's WebLogic's application server.
"Guardian works in a way similar to an antivirus framework -- you can test your environment automatically against an updated knowledge database," he said. "All those known bugs can be monitored and detected before they bite."
Guardian also automates the process of gathering information needed to address a problem, so BEA support personnel don't have to go through the current "tedious, ineffective" process of collecting data and uploading it to the support site, said Galindo.
Mehul Shah, senior manager of Verizon Communications Inc.'s homegrown service-oriented architecture, called IT Workbench, said this type of support is useful today but will be required in the future.
As an SOA grows, the complexity of integration increases, boosting the difficulty of troubleshooting any issues that may arise in that environment, Shah said.
Once a problem is identified by Guardian, the user is offered various options, including downloading a patch to resolve it, linking to a database to obtain more information about it or talking to a customer support representative, Chipman said.
The system automatically sends that representative the required files for troubleshooting the problem.
Guardian will initially be available for use with BEA WebLogic 8.1 and later, with all subsequent releases and products built on the WebLogic application server.
Sandy Rogers, an analyst at IDC, said that Guardian is designed to help users curb the complexity and risks associated with managing middleware projects that must have guaranteed availability within an SOA, where a service can be called at any time.