Making Applications Behave In Production Environments

Wily, PATH introduce management tools for 'live' apps

By David Rubinstein

February 15, 2003 —

Claiming that software testing falls short once an application is placed into a live environment, two companies-Wily Technology Inc. and PATH Communications Inc.-late last month released products into what is being called the application behavior management space.

Wily released version 4 of its management solution, which includes Introscope version 4 and two new extensions to Introscope-Transaction Tracer and Leak Hunter. Transaction Tracer brings visibility to transactions down to the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) level, according to Lew Cirne, founder and CTO of Wily (www.wilytech.com), while Leak Hunter is designed to help IT teams find memory leaks in production applications.

"There are lots of tools that help developers develop, test and deploy, and there are lots of application monitors," said Mike Malloy, marketing communications vice president at Wily. "Now, developers are told by systems management that the app isn't running right and it's your problem; you figure it out." Wily's new tools, he said, give developers the specific details they need to fix problems because they're running on the app in a live production environment, not on a desktop or in a QA lab.

"It's so difficult and expensive to replicate a production environment in a staging environment, that folks reboot systems on a frequent basis just to avoid having to deal with a leak problem," Malloy said. "That's not real good systems management. What you're doing is destroying quality of service. Your availability goes into the low 90s, and if you have a 24/7 critical app, that's unacceptable."

Meanwhile, PATH has released version 3.5 of its Path Application Manager (P.A.M.), which utilizes intelligent agents to recognize patterns of behavior in software and anticipate failure, according to Oded Noy, co-founder and CTO of PATH (www.contactpath.com).

"We're getting into an area where applications are so intertwined that things occur [in the application] that never happened in testing. What we do is really a software MRI," Noy said.

The P.A.M. solution includes Examiners, which are the intelligent agents-discrete Java applications-that can be placed on multiple servers to take snapshots of applications when they are running, looking at throughput, responsiveness, resource utilization and XML parsing, among other things. These snapshots then are processed in a central server, which establishes a pattern of behavior for the software.

If there is an abnormal spike in the activity of the XML parser, for instance, or a method takes longer to execute than expected, the developers with domain experience can come in to assess and fix the problem. "You can find the problem without having to assume what it might have been. This points you to a method and says it's not normal," Noy said.

P.A.M. users, Noy added, can check the performance at any time with a browser-based client monitor that does not require a VPN for connectivity. The solution is Java-based, but Noy said support for Microsoft .NET will be completed by March or April.

One P.A.M. server can handle 100 agents, Noy said, and sells for US$5,000 per server.

Wily, meanwhile, has rolled out Wily 4, which enables IT organizations to monitor their live applications around the clock, with the ability to drill down to assess performance issues.

The key new features in Introscope 4 include a free-form control dashboard, which developers can customize "down to the very pixel," Cirne said. "As every application and environment are unique, customers can take this vast array of deep data and convey it how they need it. A DBA wants to look at the data set in a different way than the developer." Introscope 4 also introduces environment performance agents, which collect data external to the JVM, and provides metrics to show how other factors impact that JVM's performance, Cirne said.

Cirne said Introscope Transaction Tracer can automatically discover those transactions that are running slower than the time set in a predefined parameter. "We call it 'speed trap technology.' Say we want to see the transactions that take more than 10 seconds. We only get the bad ones without having to go through all transactions." Introscope employs agents that are deployed in the JVMs of the Java applications being managed; the agents report to an enterprise manager that correlates the information and presents it to the user.

Leak Hunter solves what Cirne called "the No.1 problem that affects Java application performance"-memory leads. "This tool has the ability to reduce downtime in Java applications more than anything that's on the market," he claimed. Leak Hunter identifies tied-up memory allocations so the user can quickly target the responsible component, whether it's an Enterprise JavaBean or a Java Servlet.

Introscope 4 is sold on a per-server processor basis; the base price for a single processor is just over US$6,000, Cirne said. The new extensions cost about $2,000 each, he added.

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