Control Center, the heart of Athene, collects performance data and maintains a Performance Database populated with data captured by Acquire, Athene's own data capture agent from "targets" - operating systems or databases - and Custom Databases, populated from user collected sources. Athene's Control Center can also import data from leading third-party systems management products such as Tivoli, HP Openview and CA Unicenter. This provides the foundation for a genuine enterprise wide performance reporting capability.

The collection of performance data can be fully automated leading to reduced costs, as less staff time is required to manage the performance of a network of many disparate machines. This effortless availability of data means that automated reporting can be implemented to display and analyze activity and trends, and in the event that a problem occurs the information necessary to drill in to it is readily available for examination.

Athene and Acquires allows you to specify what level of data is captured from the host systems and how often, when to collect, and when to update the Performance Database. You tailor a performance monitoring strategy to your own requirements. You need only see the data you want to see, when you want to see it.

Control Center runs in most Windows environments (Windows XP, 2003 or later) and uses SQL Server for data storage and retrieval. The design of Control Center means that it can run completely unattended, providing robust and highly scaleable data retrieval and management.

Version 8 of Control Center has proven to be many times faster processing data than Version 7, which is due to its multithreaded design and exploitation of multiple physical processors or HyperThreading.

The System Manager component of Athene provides an administrative interface into Control Center. It provides for the definition and management of targets, their capture and collection profiles, amongst other tasks. Grouping of targets by a large variety of items is possible, which further reduces the burden of maintenance in deploying and using Athene, with the ability to make bulk changes by a simple drag-and-drop operation.

Data management is fully integrated too, allowing the Athene user to aggregate data by:

• Time - for example aggregate data from 15 minutes to 4 hour periods
• Activity - for example the top 'N' busiest disks, users, processes or commands

Data can also be archived to standard ZIP files or deleted, to provide prudent management of disk space. All data management activities can be automated by use of Athene's template and scheduling facilities.