Alive predicts deadly IT problems

  "People are not used to working with predictive alerts," contends Steve Henning. "They're used to a reactive mode." He's the vice president of products for Integrien Corp. in Irvine, Calif. And, yes, the company does offer an IT management tool called Alive that uses predictive analytics to anticipate problems before your operations staff are running around with their hair on fire. Because the software stores a "fingerprint" of previous conditions that led to a problem, it can see trending data and warn you when a similar situation is rearing its ugly head. Alive 6.0 begins shipment next week and boasts a new user interface, says Henning. It also lets you create combinations of attributes, but only receive a single alert when those combined values reach a set level. The upgrade dramatically boosts the number of metrics it can track to four million for up to 100,000 devices. Pricing starts around $125,000.