Netuitive Extends Performance Analysis to Custom Apps

The company's BSM application, Netuitive Integration Studio, monitors business and infrastructure performance metrics, potentially reducing mean time to repair.

Most large enterprises have the instrumentation for measuring the performance of networks and systems. But Netuitive, a real-time Business Service Management analysis software provider, plans to help customers take that up a notch to correlate business performance metrics with infrastructure performance metrics.

The Reston, Va., company will soon launch its Netuitive Integration Studio, which will allow users to correlate any type of business and systems data within their environment—no matter where it comes from.

Netuitive users at Priceline.com are working with the new Integration Studio to automate the correlation and analysis of IT performance metrics with airline ticket sales to improve customer service.

"Integration Studio helps you tie your systems monitoring infrastructure together with your own individual business logic, and the tool is set up to simplify the process for you. Once youve done that, you can use [Netuitives] Service Analyzer to help you analyze correlation among business and technology events," said Priceline CIO Ron Rose, in Norwalk, Conn.

To read more about Netuitives Service Analyzer, click here.

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The Netuitive Integration Studio works with Netuitives new Service Analyzer, which cross-correlates all QOS (quality-of-service) and business metrics with underlying infrastructure-monitoring metrics.

Service Analyzer is unique in its ability to show the end-to-end health of a service through its dashboards, and also in its ability to deliver "trusted alarms" that are based not on a single variable, but on a composite of metrics that make up the overall problem that triggered the alarm, according to Daniel Heimlich, vice president of marketing for Netuitive.

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"Integration Studio allows customers to quickly assess what the most relevant metrics are for an environment and build a best-practices template for that application. There may be only 15 metrics that are statistically relevant. We can find those and track them," Heimlich said.

Although Netuitive had templates for common applications such as Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server, along with Oracle, SAP and others, the Integration Studio allows users to "create customized templates for whatever monitoring environment thats specific to them. Though our focus is Business Service Management, this opens up the possibility of monitoring any type of data," he said.

Rose said, "Basically, [Service Analyzer] is trying to do what a good troubleshooter does—look for correlations in the events. I call it artificial gray matter."

That is extremely valuable for Priceline, Rose said, adding that the company has saved millions of dollars in reducing MTR (mean time to repair) through its business service metrics usage. Integration Studio helps lower those MTR costs by allowing the Service Analyzer to correlate business data with systems instrumentation to diagnose more subtle problems.

"If one of your supply chain vendors was dramatically impacting your CPU utilization or if a machine had a memory leak that could impact the supply chain, you can see that on the fly by using this combination of tools. The fact that it is dynamically correlating those things for you and helping to diagnose fairly subtle problems can help you lower your mean time to repair," Rose said. "For online [businesses] and financial services, MTR for some is $5 million bucks an hour," he added.

To work with Integration Studio, users map their data to Netuitives normalized database model. Then a plug-in is created and users identify the data streams that are relevant for creating the model, such as CPU utilization and CPU idle time. Users can click on metrics that are relevant for a given template. Then users create the model and Netuitives analysis engine applies statistical best practices to it to determine the most relevant metrics.

"In the past you needed an expert on statistics from the IT capacity planning team. Those best practices are embedded so you can spot the most relevant metrics in a statistical model," Heimlich said.

Integration Studio, available now, runs on Windows, although it is platform-independent, according to Heimlich.

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