Broader Panorama handles bigger deployments

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By Alan Zeichick

September 1, 2008 — Too often, enterprise developers are charged with monitoring their deployed applications for faults and usage spikes. Too often, they find it hard to gather data proactively across very large server deployments, so their job becomes forensics on crashed applications rather than monitoring of apps in trouble.

Opnet Technologies looks to address this challenge with the latest version of its Panorama real-time application monitoring and analytics software, which is designed to handle scalability of both running and crashed applications.

In March, Opnet brought out version 5.0 of Panorama, extending the software’s reach deep into .NET servers. Previously, Panorama had focused on monitoring and gathering analytics on Java EE servers, and only had limited .NET functionality.

Now, with Panorama 5.5, the software is designed for much larger-scale deployments of both .NET and Java EE applications. “Panorama customers can now access a single pane of glass covering a very large number of servers and still maintain the ability to drill down to even more detailed forensic data on any part of the managed infrastructure,” said Mary Evans, a company spokesperson.

Panorama monitors system and application metrics within each server, across all tiers, and reports performance anomalies, dramatically accelerating troubleshooting as well as detecting problems before they reach a critical state, according to Opnet.

Also new to Panorama 5.5 is cross-tier correlation. “This capability looks across tiers to determine which metrics are abnormal in tandem with others,” said Evans. “For example, if Panorama sees a CPU spike on a database server, it examines other tiers to determine whether the spike correlates with SQL queries, disk or CPU utilization, or a particular piece of Java code. These cross-tier correlations are done automatically, eliminating the need for manual tasks required by many competing solutions. With version 5.5, we have enhanced this capability to correlate metrics in real time collected from up to 400 servers.”

The software is designed to help developers answer such questions as, “Which Java EE or .NET classes had a large change in response time relative to what’s normal for that time of day? Did any metrics, on any tier, change dramatically at the same time my application exhibited performance problems? When my reporting JSP or ASP.NET page is slow, is anything on the database correlated? Is there a relationship between intermittent CPU spikes and the execution of particular JSP or ASP.NET pages or generic classes?”

Panorama can be deployed in conjunction with Opnet’s other application performance management software, including ACE Analyst, which provides analytics for network applications; ACE Live, for end-user experience monitoring; and IT Guru Systems Planner, for capacity planning.

Related Search Term(s): monitoring, .NET, Opnet

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