bii4P3 vs bii4P7 - Part 1: Why should you choose bii4P3

bii4P3 and bii4P7 are PATROL event adapters to connect PATROL agent older than version 9.0 with BPPM/BEM cell.  If all your PATROL agents are version 9.x and above, you don't need bii4P3 nor bii4P7 since PATROL agent v9.x can directly send events to BPPM/BEM cell. However both bii4P3 and bii4P7 still work for PATROL agent v9.x if you want to use them.

What is the difference between bii4P3 and bii4P7?  bii4P3 is a light-weight adapter at one end connecting to each PATROL agent directly and at the other end connecting to BPPM/BEM cell.  bii4P7 uses common connect library at one end connecting to PATROL console server in PATROL 7 architecture and at the other end connecting to BPPM/BEM cell.  bii4P3 was released a couple of years earlier than bii4P7.

Because PATROL console server was initially designed as a GUI component only with no built-in high availability, it was not meant to be robust enough to be used as an infrastructure integration component. When bii4P7 connects with PATROL console server, it competes with all PATROL Central users for available resources.  If not enough resource is available, bii4P7 would crash or hang, thus no event would be sent to BPPM/BEM cell.  Thus bii4P7 could become the single point of failure in your entire system monitoring architecture.

bii4P3 directly communicates with PATROL agents and completely bypasses PATROL console server or any PATROL console component.  Because it is light weight, it can be installed on any supported server (Linux, Solaris, and Windows).  The recommended capacity is 100 PATROL agents per bii4P3 instance. But you can run multiple instances on one server.

If you use PATROL Notification Server, you can connect bii4P3 to it.  However PATROL Notification Server is not required to use bii4P3 as you can configure multiple bii4P3 instances on one server or multiple servers.

I have replaced bii4P7 with bii4P3 at two of my previous client sites to repair their unstable environment.  I am currently at another client who desperately needs to replace its bii4P7 with bii4P3 too.  Their bii4P7 is running on an AIX server.  I have seen the core file produced by bii4P7 almost at daily basis.  When that happens, bii4P7 needs to be started manually. About half the time, bii4P7 appears to be started with process shown as the output of 'ps -ef' command, but no event was received by BPPM/BEM cell.  In this case bii4P7 hangs and needs to be stopped and started again.  Sometimes PATROL console server needs to be restarted in order to start bii4P7.

Neither bii4P3 nor bii4P7 has built-in high availability. In the next post, I will talk about how to configure your own high availability for bii4P3.