Review of Wily Introscope for Microsoft .

NET It is 8:15 in the morning, and as you walk by the main conference room you overhear an animated exchange between the leaders of your IT organization including directors for !!lication "evelo!ment, #roduction $u!!ort, Testing and % & In addition to your a!!lications team, you also see your com!any o!erations manager, the network manager, the lead analyst for the database team and other assorted technical leads& 'ne of your mission(critical, com!osite a!!lications is down and the finger(!ointing is slowly escalating& )ow could this situation have been avoided* I+ll tell you how& In today+s enter!rise environments, com!osite a!!lications create de!endencies between multi!le technologies,and their res!ective stakeholders& )eterogeneity is now the norm, and it can have unintended conse-uences for large enter!rises& Imagine in the exam!le above that you+re an enter!rise su!!ort lead, and one of your .usiness /nit directors !urchased a &01T based marketing analytics !roduct, des!ite the fact that your com!any is !rimarily a 2311 sho!& 4our team used $ervices 'riented rchitecture 5$' 6 enabled 7eb $ervices to integrate !roduction 2311 a!!lication data into the &01T analytics tool for consolidated re!orting to IT and business managers& 4our most senior 5and most ex!ensive6 IT leads are trying to get to the bottom of an a!!lication !roblem that is causing your business to lose money due to failing customer transactions& 1ven though the !oint solutions that manage !erformance data for everyone+s individual a!!lications are 8all green,9 the com!ound a!!lication they enable is not working end(to(end& .usiness leaders are com!laining about loss of revenue, and the situation is becoming worse with each !assing minute& )ow did the com!lexity of your enter!rise environment get out of hand* )ow could this costly downtime have been avoided* Overview of CA Wily Introscope for .NET 7ily Technology is known for !ioneering and leading the market for tools to manage !roduction 2311 a!!lications& Their Introsco!e solution features !atented agent technology that runs inside nearly any 2311 a!!lication servers 57eb:ogic, 7eb$!here, etc&6, and a system for collecting information and automatically generating real(time alerts that allow IT leaders to interce!t !erformance !roblems before they com!romise business !erformance&

Caption: Introscope for .NET automatically detects your applications and t eir dependencies and displays t em in OOT! das "oards li#e t is. The new 7ily Introsco!e for &01T solution significantly ex!ands 7ily+s reach and value to IT organizations by adding an integrated &01T agent to Introsco!e that consolidates both 2311 and &01T a!!lication management metrics in a single !roduct& Introsco!e also monitors the !erformance of back(end systems such as databases and middleware, so the addition &01T makes it one of the most com!rehensive management solutions available today& This consolidated view of !erformance management that Introsco!e for &01T enables will be a boon to com!anies because it streamlines the !rocess of !roblem resolution& robust, !roduction level a!!lication !erformance monitoring solution, 7ily Introsco!e is ca!able of monitoring end(to(end transactions in real(time as they cross com!lex, heterogeneous enter!rise a!!lications& The solution monitors !erformance 3; x < of any !roduction server that su!!orts a !ortion of a given target a!!lication, unlike other tools like such as .=> !!$ight that can only used after there has been a !roblem has ha!!ened with the odd ho!e that the same !roblem reoccurs&

$ey %eatures of Introscope for .NET 7ily Introsco!e for &01T is the first !roduct that brings com!rehensive !roduction a!!lication management and root(cause !roblem analysis to the world of &01T& 7ith customizable alerts and detailed re!orting, organizations can now elect to end the ?blame game+ as illustrated in the beginning of this article and re!lace it with an informed conversation between the a!!ro!riate IT stakeholders& > +s new 7ily Introsco!e for &01T delivers the following features and benefits to !eo!le tasked with the management of mission(critical a!!lications: >om!rehensive visibility @ )eterogeneity is a difficult, and real management challenge& Introsco!e collects !erformance data from today+s most !o!ular and im!ortant a!!lications including 2311, &01T, middleware and connected back end systems and !resents the data in a ?single !ane of glass+& Aeal(transaction monitoring ( In addition to collecting #ermon data, Introsco!e uses a =icrosoft standard interface and 7ily+s !atented instrumentation technology to collect advanced availability and !erformance data from &01T a!!lications& utomatic a!!lication discovery @ Introsco!e for &01T adds intelligent new features including the ability to automatically identify, instrument and assess normal !erformance of &01T and 2311 a!!lications and connected back end systems @ something sure to save o!erations managers a ton of time& :ow overhead ( If you are going to use it in !roduction all of the time, it has to be rock solid, and not create the !roblem you are trying to solve& Introsco!e has a very light foot!rint in terms of both memory and >#/& utomated alerts ( There are lots of !roducts that can monitor and alert& $ince Introsco!e collects it own data at the a!!lications level, the alerts based u!on that data are truly useful& >ustomizable re!orting @ Transaction !erformance data is stored in Introsco!e+s $mart$tor database to generate $: re!orts that are based u!on true a!!lication level metrics like res!onse time and a!!lications availability&

Replayin& Our 'cenario wit Introscope for .NET Installed It is 8:15 in the morning, and as you walk by the main conference room you notice it is em!ty& 4ou !ass by the director of #roduction $u!!ort and the "atabase Team lead in the hall who want to give you a heads u! that there was a !roblem with the new analytics a!!lication @ but that it+s already been corrected& It turns out that the director of #roduction $u!!ort received an automated alert in the = when res!onse times for the new a!!lication were exceeded 1 second& )e went to the '!erations 'verview of Introsco!e to get a to! down look at !erformance and could immediately see that the database !erformance was below normal levels& )e drilled into the "atabase "etail view and contacted the "atabase =anager at his office, who did the same&

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Caption: Introscope(s application detail views are easily availa"le wit a sin&le clic# from t e Operations Overview 0oting that the .ackend $ummary light was yellow, his next ste! was to go look at some back end detail for the database server& "rilling down in Introsco!e, the "atabase Team lead immediately noticed that the number of "atabase >onnections in use has s!iked, and the number of available "atabase >onnections has dro!!ed to zero Introsco!e allows the team to find and ins!ect the transactions that are causing the slowdown, and identify the module that contains those transactions& It turns out that the module in -uestion was allocating database connections and not releasing them when it was done with its transaction, which over time consumed the available !ool of database connections& 0ow that the !!lications $u!!ort Team knows that this is an issue with how the a!!lication is using "atabase connections, they can engage their develo!ment team confident they know the root(cause of the !roblem&

Caption: )se Introscope(s TransactionTracer function to see pro"lematic transactions and understand w y t ey(re failin& W at I Really *i#e a"out Introscope for .NET .eyond dee! functionality, there are two really im!ortant solution(wide benefits of this !roduct& The first is that&01T !roduct leverages all of the develo!ment and engineering work 7ily invested over the years as they led the market for 2311 management& $o, the &01T !roduct literally stands on the shoulders of the 2311 !roduct, and is very stable and feature rich as a result& The second is that the &01T !roduct shares the same database, alerting system, and console with the 2311 !roduct& 7ith $ervice 'riented rchitecture a!!lications growing in !o!ularity, it is becoming increasingly the case that one $' based a!!lications system will have some !ieces written in 2ava to a 2311 a!!lications server, and some other !ieces written to &01T& bsent this new 7ily !roduct, having one a!!lication that

uses both 2ava and &01T adds another dimension to the ?blame game+ that was de!icted at the beginning of this review& Areas for Improvement Wit Introscope for .NET 7ily is well known for leading the market in tools for 2311 a!!lications management& 2311 a!!lications tend to be large, com!lex, business critical, and have their business logic centralized into relatively few 2311 a!!lications servers& $o, the base !rice of BC,;5D !er >#/ in the 2311 a!!lications server is reasonable given the benefits that 7ily !rovides in the 2311 world& If you have 2311 a!!lications that you are already managing with 7ily, and you are adding some &01T com!onents or services to these a!!lications, buying more 7ily licenses at this !rice is a reasonable way to manage what will become an extremely com!lex com!ound a!!lication& )owever, Introsco!e may be overkill for sho!s who are !utting their first de!artmental or internal &01T a!!lication together that needs to work, but that is not as business critical as the ty!ical 2311 a!!lication& Conclusion If your enter!rise environment contains both 2311 and &01T based a!!lications, Introsco!e for &01T from > 7ily can !rovide you with a single console that delivers visibility into both !latforms and connected back(end systems for a truly com!rehensive view of a!!lication !erformance& If you+re managing a com!osite a!!lication that contains both 2ava and &01T com!onents, then this !roduct could be of even greater benefit to your organization& Aut or .ernd )arzog >1' #= 1x!erts .ernd&)arzogEa!mex!erts&com !yline: .ernd )arzog is an industry analyst and strategy consultant focusing u!on the a!!lications !erformance and end(user ex!erience markets&