Tango/04 Eyes Business Agility with Updated Monitoring Tools

May 21, 2013 Alex Woodie

Tango/04 last week announced the general availability of SmartConsole 8.0, the latest version of its multi-platform systems monitoring tool that includes new iOS and Android tablet interfaces and a cloud back end. The software can be used for much more than delivering notification of a failed job on the IBM i server, as Tango/04 is setting is sites on helping customers to monitor a wide range of business events as a means to increase agility.

Tango/04 built a name for itself by providing systems monitoring and management capabilities for the IBM i platform with its flagship VISUAL Message Center product. Over the years, the Spanish company’s goals have broadened, starting with the big push to enable business service management (BSM) with the launch of VMC 7.0 in 2006. The following year, it kicked off a big push of agile service management (ASM) concepts to help customers deploy certain best practice IT processes (ITIL) in a rapid manner.

Today, the company’s focus is on SmartConsole, the core interface used for managing VMC. (Tango/04 labeled SmartConsole its “flagship” offering, even though SmartConsole is technically a component of the over-arching VMC suite.) It appears that Tango/04 is focusing its time and money (including four years and “millions of dollars”) on the Web-based interface.

SmartConsole 8.0, which we first covered in September, brings a range of new features, not the least of which are the Web 2.0 GUI and ThunderCloud back end. Customers can now get SmartConsole up and running with little more than an iPad or Android tablet.

But the big question is: What can users do with SmartConsole? ASM and BSM sound like great concepts, but what does it mean to customers? Here are some examples provided by Tango/04:

First, a bank could used SmartConsole to model the relationships among the customer service department, physical branches, online banking website, and the ATM network. The product can monitor service levels across each of these customer touch-points, and provide an easy way to see the latest trends and forecasted service levels.

SmartConsole can also be used on the incident management desk to help companies fix the incidents that have the greatest impact on the business. So, a bank could use SmartConsole to place a higher priority on online banking problems than on telephone banking problems.

With version 8, SmartConsole users can now deploy the software on a cloud back end thanks to the new ThunderCloud service. Tango/04 also added a new Web interface, which also can be displayed on iOS and Android tablets.

Tango/04’s new SmartConsole interface allows users to view business events on a map.

Version 8 brings an improved real-time service model (RTSM) that’s designed to help customers rapidly model their service dependencies and relationships. Tango/04 says this will help customers provide accurate root cause detection and business impact analysis.

“Companies everywhere need to protect their revenue from competitors, and providing proper quality of service is key,” Tango/04 CEO Raul Cristian Aguirre says in a press release. “We are proud to lead the transition from technical-oriented, less valuable monitoring projects into business-aligned, fully customer-oriented ones.”

SmartConsole 8.0 also brings faster event processing; automatic enterprise views; and a new player to automatically loop selected views. Tango/04 also improved its Dashboards and Reports offerings. Dashboards also gains the capability to access any ODBC-based database; new dashboard screenshots functions; the capability to integrate with other products through a dynamic links features; and customizable navigation bars. Reports gains an improved report launcher; new BSM reports; extended file export support; support for HTTPS; and better performance.