Perl has been around for
years. Licensed under the GNU Public License, with the source code freely
distributed, Perl has become a wildly successful and robust programming
environment. Primarily developed in the open systems
environment, it has been ported to a vast array of platforms, including
Microsoft. The rich integration capabilities of Perl
have made it the choice language of systems integrators to “glue” one
application to another and make them work together. A
common example of this is interfacing the Web Server with a backend database
server via Perl “modules” (i.e. CGI) to enable the database content to be
delivered to the end user in a nicely formatted context.
What is Perl? (From:
http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.6/pod/perlfaq1.html)
--> "Perl is a high-level programming language
with an eclectic heritage written by Larry Wall and a cast of thousands. It
derives from the ubiquitous C programming language and to a lesser extent
from sed, awk, the Unix shell, and at least a dozen other tools and
languages. Perl's process, file, and text manipulation facilities make it
particularly well-suited for tasks involving quick prototyping, system
utilities, software tools, system management tasks, database access,
graphical programming, networking, and world wide web programming. These
strengths make it especially popular with system administrators and CGI
script authors, but mathematicians, geneticists, journalists, and even
managers also use Perl. Maybe you should, too."
BMC Software’s Patrol
line of software offers the most comprehensive, world class, best of breed
enterprise monitoring and management tool on the market today.
It’s unparalleled vertical and horizontal scalability make it the
tool of choice for Service Assurance. It monitors and can help manage the
enterprise from end-to-end to ensure the availability, capacity, and
performance of the operating system and application space.
ManageIT has developed the perl4patrol module that bridges the two
environments: Perl and BMC Patrol.
Typically, folks who are charged with the responsibility of systems
management or integration work, who have a broad range of responsibilities,
do so with 4GL environments such as shell scripts, Perl, Windows Batch
Files, or other procedural languages. Programming
languages such as C, C++, and Java are usually reserved for programmers, who
have a very narrow but deep view of the “point tool” that they are charged
with creating. At ManageIT Inc., our experience has
educated us that people who are charged with the responsibility of managing
and monitoring servers, applications, and/or networks, are not typically
from a programming background, yet they write a prolific number of scripts,
be it shell scripts, Perl, et. al.
The
advantages of perl4patrol are many:
o
Allows
personnel charged with the responsibilities of systems management/monitoring
to take advantage of functions provided by the PATROL API, without
knowing C!
o
Create
custom scripts or even applications written in Perl that interact with your
new and/or existing PATROL environment.
o
Take
existing in-house developed Perl scripts, and modify them to interact with
your PATROL environment. This saves time and money, as
you do not have to rewrite your code into PSL, unless of course, you want
to.
o
Integrate
Patrol to another application using a Perl interface!
o
Perl
scripts, when developed with care, are easier* to port across
multiple platforms. C programs are not, as you have to
locate (and sometimes pay for) a compiler that will build your application
on each target platform. perl4patrol, which supports
most popular platforms, you can write your Perl script with perl4patrol
once, and run them anywhere perl4patrol is supported.
(* anything is easy if
you know how to do it
J)
o
Although
the Patrol Agent does have the ability to launch Perl scripts via it’s
native command types, via the locally installed Perl interpreter, the
interaction between the Perl script and Patrol is extremely limited.
PATROL will only understand a numeric return code from the script.
Using perl4patrol, the Perl script can now interact with the Agent’s
namespace, and even execute PSL code embedded in the Perl script itself.
Of course, these scripts can be run as a command from [Pre-]Discovery
or Parameters, or be executed on a standalone basis.
o
Given the
incredible popularity of Perl (a freely available language, but can be
commercially supported, analogous to what Redhat is to Linux), and it’s
respective robustness and , a Perl script writer has access to dozens and
dozens of modules available on the Web. At the time of
this writing, one can view the list of modules at this link:
http://www.perl.com/CPAN-local/modules/index.html,
and there were roughly 4500 modules for a user to choose from.
o
Finally,
you can use perl4patrol within mod_perl (a Perl module that is dynamically
loaded by the Apache Webserver, enabling extremely fast execution of
Perl scripts, within Apache. Why not hook in perl4patrol
to interact with your PATROL environment? Build your own
web enabled Patrol Console!
By
integrating the extensive capabilities of the Perl language, coupled with
the robust scalability of BMC’s Patrol, System Administrators can develop
comprehensive solutions to assist monitoring and event management throughout
the Patrol enterprise.
Licensing
Historic Note: Prior to the release of perl4patrol
V2.0, perl4patrol was a free unsupported module. Due to the
overwhelming (but very good!) amount of communication requesting support
for some library incompatibilities, requests for support for certain
Perl distributions, some internal bugs in the code, interested parties
asking us to write scripts for them to perform specific functions,
ManageIT has made the decision (with BMC Software's encouragement) to
take perl4patrol to commercial status. As such, ManageIT will no longer
provide fixes for prior releases of perl4patrol. We think (and have
been repeatedly told) that our product offers immense value to BMC
Patrol Administrators/Developers, Systems Management Developers and
Architects, and IT Infrastructure integration. Now that it is
commercial, you can be assured that our attention will be focused on
providing the best service.
ManageIT is able to provide demo licenses to those
who are interested in testing out the perl4patrol module prior to buying
it. Contact
sales@manageit.ca
for details!
Documentation
-
You may view the perl4patrol User's Guide
here:
-
BMC Software's Web Site is located at:
http://www.bmc.com
-
There is a vast wealth of information
about Perl on the Web. You can start here:
http://www.perl.com
Downloads
perl4patrol has been successfully tested with
PATROL Agents version 3.3.X --> 3.6.X. We even tested with V3.2.5, but
not extensively, but the tests we conducted did work. Contact
support@manageit.ca
for your particular situation
NOTE: Although you are able to download
the product files, you will not be able to connect to a PATROL Agent,
unless you obtain a license from ManageIT.
Licensing terms and
conditions are covered at the end of the perl4patrol User Guide.
Click
here if
you wish to verify the files below with md5 checksums. It is strongly
encouraged that you do this to verify that your download integrity is
assured.
Click here for the release
notes
