Red Hat Inc. is adding monitoring capability to the systems management options for the enterprise version of its Linux operating system.
The company made the announcement this week at LinuxWorld San Francisco, one of several moves its making to show resellers and users that it helping them
create secure networks.
VARs should be able to take advantage of the new tool to gain added revenues, said Mike Ferris, Red Hat’s director of identity and security solutions.
“Any partner that has a customer with many machines can work with it around identifying security or performance issues on their network“, he said.
“Then the partner can identify additional opportunities for service or products the customer may need to purchase to extend their environment.”
The module, part of Red Hat Network, lets administrators watch CPU utilization, disk throughput, memory utilization and process health of Linux servers. In addition, it will also monitor network traffic including FTP and HTTP data. Logs, log size and pattern matching can also be done.
In addition the performance number of Linux-based applications can be monitored including Oracle 8i,9i and MySQL databases, BEA’s WebLogic and Apache Web server.
“A lot of the power comes from the fact that you can create your monitoring probes through included tools we’re providing,” Ferris added.
The monitoring module brings to four the number of add-ons that can be bought for Red Hat Network. Others are update, management and provisioning.
Like the others, the monitoring module is sold by subscription, and costs US$96 per system a year. It can be ordered through distributors and then downloaded from Red Hat.
The company also announced it is adding migration support for Sun Microsystems’ Solaris operating system to Red Hat Enterprise.
It is also announcing the availability of Red Hat Certificate System, an authentication layer that controls the issuing, management and revocation of PKI certificates for users who need secure environments.
“It ensures people who connect to a network are who they say they are,” said Ferris.
The capability came from Red Hat’s acquisition of Netscape technology last year.
The certificate system is sold by subscription and costs US$6 a certificate.
Finally, the company said it is adding Smart Card support to Enterprise Linux.