The company made the announcement last month at LinuxWorld San Francisco, one of several moves it made 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.
A number of Linux-based applications can be also monitored, including Oracle 8i,9i and MySQL data- bases, 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.
Probes can monitor systems, network functionality, or applications. Over 60 pre-built probes are available initially for Linux applications from leading vendors. Users can also create custom probes using tools provided.
Probes can also be grouped together to create probe suites. They can be deployed to groups of systems at once, allowing thousands of probes to be created with a single click. Once deployed, customers can adjust the probe configurations for all systems that received the suite.
Fourth module
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.
The capability came from Red Hat’s acquisition of Netscape technology last year.
The Red Hat 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.