Developers Gain a Window into JVM With Wily

That's the problem that Wily Technology hopes to address. The Burlingame, Calif.-based company's Introscope product has the ability to peer deep into the relationships between applications and devices during the development process to spot issues that escape other management solutions.

"The Java Virtual Machine (JVM) didn't have a performance management solution for systems under load," says Vic Nyman, vice president of marketing and sales at Wily. "We allow managers to drill down to see systems under load and analyze the relationship between different elements."

For example, a bottleneck on a server may be caused by a problem in the relationship between a Java applet and the database application. Traditional monitoring tools may detect a slowdown in server performance, and they may detect increased response time from the database. When problems occur at the level of the JVM, the cause of that slowdown may elude traditional systems.

The Introscope Web Application Monitor can examine Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) servlets and the events that take place behind them, enabling managers to get to the root cause of problems more quickly.

"We don't take the place of traditional management frameworks," said Nyman. "We provide a greater level of visibility" when those other systems detect problems, he said.

Evidence of this was delivered this week in the form of partnerships Wily announced here with Hewlett-Packard and Sun's iPlanet. Those deals augment existing partnerships with IBM/Tivoli and BEA.

For some customers, Introscope can play an important role even before systems go live. Resellers can use the tool as "training wheels" to test systems and spot problems before deployment and then resell it to their customers when the system enters production. "It ends up being a testing tool for system strategies and architecture," says Nyman."

That use of the system has evolved considerably in the past year, driven by the way customers think about their computing infrastructure changing.

"A year ago, nearly 80 percent of our customers were people who had tried everything to fix problems with existing installations," says Nyman. "Now it's split roughly 50-50 between those folks and people who are approaching management proactively."