Resonate Advances Commanders App Testing Abilities

Commander 2.1 can identify failures across multi-URL transactions and execute new test types across FTP and DNS traffic.

Traffic-management-turned-application-performance-management-provider Resonate Inc. Monday announced a new release of its flagship Commander tool that further expands the products reach.

The Sunnyvale, Calif., company next week will release Commander 2.1 with enhanced root cause identification, more corrective actions, and enhanced usability and scale.

The new Commander release can now identify failures across multi-URL transactions and execute new test types across File Transfer Protocol and Domain Name Service traffic as well as Internet mail traffic such as Simple Message Transfer Protocol, POP3 and IMAP.

Commander, which can be configured to perform active testing against Internet applications, also sports a new wizard for creating transaction tests.

"Other vendors only do the outside or inside view, or they put it together with a lot of hard work on the part of the user. We make it easy," said Brad Jung, director of product marketing at Resonate. "It can visually correlate whats going wrong, and it kicks off a whole set of actions--including sending out alerts and managing traffic around a problem. And well present to the operator a range of options they can take. They can choose to have that fully automated."

"It is exactly what a management product should do: Monitor infrastructure components and applications in real time, be able to capture a certain number of parameters like response time, detect failures, do root cause analysis, and perform some corrective actions," said Jean-Pierre Garbani, senior industry analyst with Giga Information Group in Cambridge, Mass. "Its what Id call a service assurance kind of product, which is what we should [focus on]."

Although it is a "thought leader" in its market space, which includes Mercury Interactive and Proactivenet, it focuses on a subset of the overall market for application performance management, Garbani said. That limits the presence and visibility of the small company in comparison to large players such as BMC Software Inc or IBMs Tivoli unit, he said.

Commander is made up of agents for specific Web application servers to provide monitoring of Java 2 Enterprise Edition applications. It also includes a series of test engines that can test transactions both inside and outside the firewall and feed the results into a service model. The service model provides a logical view of end-user service levels correlated with the performance of application components. In testing HTTP functions, tests can be constructed for a single transaction that uses multiple URLs. The test can determine which URL failed in the transaction.

The new release also includes adapters that can incorporate data from Keynote Systems testing tools, the ability to sort and filter lists, and the ability to do comparative graphing.

The software starts at $50,000.

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