Introduction

Early in the history of enterprise applications, all management of those applications was controlled and monitored through mainframes. This system allowed for automatic consolidation and correlation of data from multiple sources and provided a single place to look when something went wrong. All aspects of the system as a whole including network connectivity, system stability, and application functionality could be ascertained by looking in one place.

Time has moved on and distributed systems have become the norm. No longer do we have a default single point of information regarding systems in our environments. Now, instead of a central computer, we have heterogeneous systems distributed in multiple locations connected by multiple networked systems and secured by multiple security devices. This increase in distribution has given us a plethora of information sources regarding the functional aspects of the systems we are responsible for maintaining.

Aside from there being different sources for the information we need, the information is often in different formats. Data gathered from a Windows 2003 server will differ from that gathered from a Cisco switch, which in turn will be in an entirely different format from the data you pull from an AIX server. This has led to a great deal of specialization where experts on specific systems can understand and translate the retrieved data, but technical people fluent in other platforms may not be able to understand it. This adds an additional challenge to managing the systems within an enterprise.

With varying sources of information gathered in different formats...