Fidelia Beefs Up Software

Fidelia Technology Inc. is adding automatic application discovery capabilities to its integrated performance, fault and business service monitoring software.

NetVigil 3.6 extends Fidelias business container technology, which stores the relationship of components that make up a business service by adding analysis of the underlying relationships among business service components. Such analysis reduces the number of false alerts sent when a business service fails.

"In the new containers, we look at the relationship between the application layer, Layer 2 and Layer 3 dependencies, and we track those and store them in the container," said Vikas Aggarwal, president of the Princeton, N.J., company.

The discovery engine uses a library of objects to perform its discovery function. Fidelia added to its library support for Oracle Corp., Citrix Systems Inc., Microsoft Corp. Exchange and SQL servers, Web servers, and other database management systems. "Based on the type of device and our library, it runs a pattern of tests to find which applications are running on the servers and what are the relevant parameters to be monitored. We discover tables inside the database, start monitoring transaction rates, the number of locks inside a database and so on," said Aggarwal.

NetVigil 3.6s business containers can represent a geographic location, a business unit, a revenue-generating service or any boundary that helps isolate the root cause of slow business services.

The business containers offer "a very flexible way [to] map all of the structures and substructures in the services. They can basically take switches and computers and put them in a container for specific things like, say, accounting," said Jeffrey Nudler, a senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates Inc., in Portsmouth, N.H. "Others have similar capabilities, but [Fidelia does] it for much less money in the middle market."

Users at the Yale University School of Medicine, in New Haven, Conn., find the new containers can help troubleshoot problems faster, according to Richard Beebe, manager of systems and network engineering. "Our production mail server is two Unix boxes in a cluster connected to a SAN [storage area network]. We can put the Unix boxes and various processes plus the SAN and the network connection to it into one view—a container called E-mail Server. If anything goes, the help desk has a better idea of what things are affected," said Beebe.

The software is priced starting at $40,000, and a typical implementation costs about $80,000, according to Aggarwal. Version 3.6 is available now.