A recent news story points out that hybrid cards aren’t getting gas mileage that drivers expected based on EPA testing. Consumer Reports is testing hybrids with their own standards, which they hope offer a realistic test environment. The automotive industry is responding by encouraging drivers to take courses that will help drivers change their driving habits so that the combined technologies are optimized. However, the winning proposition given by a hybrid vehicle is that the combination of two technologies should give you the benefits of each while lessening the detrimental affects of one or the other. Each technology should be able to help the other.
Interestingly, electric and gas combustion combinations aren’t the only hybrids available either. Before the holidays, slashdotters were talking about the fact that BMW just announced a steam hybrid engine that collects 80% of the heat off the exhaust systems and reuses it to assist the gas engine, offering power and torque gains. With these automotive hybrids, you gain the extra power and pickup of a gas-based vehicle when you need it, but also conserve gas and dollars at the pump by relying on electric power when you can.
Much like a hybrid vehicle’s technology choices, BMC Performance Manager has choices for you to deploy agents to collect data, or to use a lightweight piece to collect only the data you’re most interested in, or do remote monitoring only. How you optimize your system for data collection depends on the type of “driving” you do and what your goals are for the environment you’re monitoring. Bill Hunter and I recently co-authored a white paper titled “Agentless or Agent-based Monitoring? Choose a Hybrid Approach with BMC Performance Manager” that offers more explanation of the relating your monitoring to the business and choosing the approach that makes the most sense for the type of monitoring. Here’s the introductory paragraph.
As most administrators know, some IT components are more important than others. Most availability and performance-monitoring products, however, cannot make that distinction. Consider for example, that a router serving a single employee fails while that employee is at home eating dinner two time zones away. Do you need to be awakened in the middle of the night just to fix the router, which the employee will not even need until the next business day? Most likely the answer is no. Ideally, you need the flexibility to monitor what matters at the level of granularity that is required by the business. Choosing between robust products with deep functionality and simple ones with “good enough” functionality is a common dilemma.
The BMC® Performance Manager product from BMC® Software resolves this issue by combining the robust functionality of BMC® PATROL® product architecture with the simplicity of BMC® Performance Manager Express.
Download the paper if you’d like to read more. What do you think about hybrid technology offered to us today? Feel free to let us know your thoughts.