Tidal Software has announced Intersperse 8.0, a product that monitors J2EE and .NET applications and their transaction component performance to produce meaningful metrics for managing applications and high-level business processes. The product leverages a combination of lightweight Java Management Extensions (JMX) and byte-code injection to span the need for both lightweight and deep level analysis. This provides a meaningful basis for monitoring and trending the performance of components as well as business processes. It also allows Intersperse 8.0 to deliver proactive alerts if a process encounters an error, which allows rapid identification of problems. Intersperse 8.0 can also generate an automated responses to initiate a corrective action to keep a web application running without human intervention.

Component-Level Health Monitoring

"Intersperse 8.0 provides a 'single view' of applications and their components," said Wayne Greene, Tidal vice president of product management. "At its highest level, the Server Health Dashboard shows the status of applications and components. It also shows the top-level availability status of all managed servers as well as all open alerts."

Intersperse 8.0 also monitors and detects memory leaks caused by the code or the application. "The user can set alerts against any component to allow appropriate action to be taken -- including the execution of complex corrective actions," Greene continued. "Processes which have stalled are also identified for fast resolution - either through automated corrective action or alerting application support staff."

Intersperse 8.0 also maintains lists of the top 10 slowest components based on selected metrics such as memory usage or run time, thus rapidly creating a list of all the system's trouble areas that need to be addressed.

The visibility of Intersperse 8.0 extends into the components of J2EE and .NET applications through byte-code instrumentation. This can be triggered manually, or automatically when a certain condition is detected, or when a problem requires diagnosis. Intersperse 8.0 also provides deep health monitoring for the back end databases such as Oracle and Sybase.

"Intersperse 8.0 brings a level of monitoring and corrective action to the market that will make the deployment of more and more complex environments manageable," said Andi Mann, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. "The impact on an enterprise's ability to manage high-level business processes will provide them with a welcome competitive edge in today's increasingly difficult business environment."

Application Mapping

Many enterprises are going through mergers and acquisitions, or are deploying web service and SOA components to achieve new business processing capabilities as fast as they are becoming available. This means that usually not all the components of the applications are known to the support staff. It's nearly impossible to know exactly which components are active in a given production application, or how they interact with each other. Intersperse 8.0 discovers and maps all distributed composite applications, which creates an end-to-end view of the application components and dynamic business processes.

This view is presented in an easy-to-understand graphical display of the deployed application environment. This display is invaluable when conducting impact analysis and root cause analysis. The application mapping function also allows the end user to augment the application map to represent additional data sources and to aggregate the entire application ecosystem into complete, detailed, end-to-end view within a single tool.

Business Process Tracing

Monitoring applications as a total business process in composite web application environments is exceedingly complex. The business process must be traced across service layers, through the full process sequence and across heterogeneous infrastructures. Intersperse 8.0 provides the broad platform and runtime coverage that allows tracking of the most complex business processes. It can follow the process flow from portal to back-end application server and over a message bus. It can do this without relying on vendor specific tracing or being limited to a single application server type.

Intersperse 8.0 provides immediate information on the end-to-end performance of a specific user transaction, an overall user session, or a complex automated business process. Its visual dashboards, tracing views and filtering tools allow quick identification of problems anywhere within the process. Intersperse 8.0 addresses real-world J2EE, .NET, Web Services and SOA deployments that have leveraged existing assets, and made time-to-market a priority.

Corrective Actions & Intelligent Automation

In addition to its monitoring capabilities, Intersperse 8.0 also provides capabilities for automating routine tasks by configuring them to run based on monitoring results. Intersperse 8.0 actually supports the ability to orchestrate actions into a business process. These actions could automatically resolve problems that are well known, or they could provide stop-gap or self-healing actions for the process. Within the application server, Intersperse 8.0 can initiate corrective actions through JMX interfaces. Outside the application server it can do it through command executions or web service operations. It can also make configuration changes to the server itself.