Mercury Adds Mapping to Performance Suite

Users looking to dynamically manage end-to-end application performance will see improved tools from Mercury Interactive Corp.

At its annual user conference in Orlando, Fla., this week, the developer will unveil the next major release of its BAC (Business Availability Center) suite, which integrates automatic discovery and application dependency mapping.

Those capabilities, delivered in BAC 5.0s Mercury Application Mapping component, include 150 discovery patterns that can map "the entire IT universe" and correlate dependencies with servers and networks to the applications, said Ramin Sayar, director of application management products at Mercury, based in Mountain View, Calif.

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"Thats important to determine what the changes are that happen on a daily basis—whats been added or taken away, whether a new Web server has been added to the cluster, or suddenly a server is now shared instead of dedicated," Sayar said. Ultimately, that allows IT to "marry end-user issues and infrastructure issues to isolate and diagnose problems faster," he said.

While the ability to track configuration changes and map application dependencies to underlying infrastructure exists in tools from several small players, such as Relicore Inc. and Troux Technologies Inc., Mercury was the first large management player to acquire such technology, according to Meta Group Inc. analyst Glenn ODonnell, in Palmerton, Pa.

The mapping modules ability to show how distributed applications are affected by configuration changes is "amazing," said Mercury user David Pinkus, senior director of software at the Apollo Group Inc., in Phoenix. "To correlate the change in your environment and see the actual performance impact of it from the end-user perspective takes capacity planning and performance management to a new level," Pinkus said.

Mercurys BAC suite is made up of several application modules, a real-time dashboard and an enterprise foundation. In addition to Application Mapping, the suite includes End User Management, Service Level Management, Diagnostics, Analytics and the new System Availability Management modules.

Mercury also enhanced the End User Management module to combine performance data from synthetic transactions and real-time use into a single view. The suite is available now.

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