Wily's Introscope Is In A Class By Itself

Because agents are embedded in components, Introscope can collect average transaction response time from Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs), SQL calls, number of invocations, and maximum and minimum module response times—all in realtime. These agents focus on identifying components that may cause problems by differentiating component response time from external response time.

What's more, Introscope's embedded agents allow programmers to trace processes between components so programmers can review how each component responds when commands are invoked.

Introscope arrives with a Java Swing-based tool called Workstation that defines and tests monitoring metrics. For quick display purposes, Introscope includes WebView, a browser-based Java monitoring tool. WebView is essentially a read-only view of the metrics defined inside the Workstation tool. Using Workstation, administrators can generate HTML reports or push data to SNMP servers using an SNMP adapter. WebView dashboards can be customized to display different metrics for different groups in an organization. IT managers, line-of-business managers, programmers and administrators can all view metrics information appropriate to their job roles.

With WebView, programmers can incorporate specific functionality from different application components into large "traffic lights" to make reading metrics more user-friendly. These traffic lights are status indicators that can identify normal operation or flag potential problems. Introscope uses green, yellow and red indicators to represent OK, caution and danger, respectively. These alerts can trigger e-mail messages, execute shell scripts to initiate server processes and hyperlink to other dashboards.

Introscope can show the interactions between Java applications and back-end systems using various connectors but cannot flag problems with these back-end systems. However, programmers can create Web pages using the customizable dashboard features to provide step-by-step instructions to other development teams to quickly solve recurring problems.

In addition to Java agents, Introscope includes an environment performance agent (EPA), which gathers metrics from non-Java sources such as operating systems, Web servers and databases. The agents collect metrics such as memory usage, CPU utilization and network connectivity status. These metrics are primarily used by customers interested in correlating Java application metrics with metrics from other systems to determine potential performance bottlenecks outside a J2EE environment. The EPA environment is customizable so programmers can write proprietary scripts in Perl, JavaScript or VBScript to run these EPAs.

In typical Introscope deployments, these large collections of metrics are stored in flat files, and metric subsets are stored in separate databases for capacity planning and trend analysis. This situation is not ideal, since most times the collected metrics are somewhat outdated snapshots that do not reflect current performance and application interaction. In December, Introscope will release a new data-storage technology called SmartStor, which will allow users to retrieve and view data in realtime. This is a significant improvement over retrieving outdated data from flat files and databases.

With SmartStor, administrators will be able to view live and historical data simultaneously in realtime to more easily aggregate data at any capacity. The data is still stored in a flat file that requires very little storage capacity on a hard drive. Over time, administrators can consolidate data to eliminate redundancies and save even more space.

Wily Technology offers partners an average reseller margin of 20 percent. Marketing collateral, joint marketing activities, Web site placement of a partner's logo and joint customer events are also offered. The company offers integration assistance and post-sales support. Technical support is provided via Web or over the telephone during business hours. Introscope is priced at $6,250 per CPU.

CHANNEL PROGRAM SNAPSHOTS
>Introscope 5.0

COMPANY: Wily Technology, Inc.
Brisbane, Calif.
(415) 562-2000
www.wilytech.com
DISTRIBUTORS: Crosslogic, iRise, Perificient, Prolifics
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