Proactivenet Upgrades Namesake Tool

Version 5.0 of the app performance and analysis tool adds new diagnostics wizard and root cause analysis enhancements.

Proactivenet Inc. next week will pick up the root cause analysis drumbeat with version 5.0 of its namesake applications performance and analysis tool.

Enhancements in the latest release of the tool focus on making administration of the tool as well as problem identification and resolutions more efficient. The Santa Clara, Calif., company added a new diagnostics wizard that can automatically get relevant data from a device for use in locating the source of the problem. The Wizard executes a script on a monitored device when the tool detects an abnormality.

The new release also adds root cause analysis enhancements that allow more knowledgeable IT operators to manually associate events and alarms for known problems and make those available to less skilled technicians. "Once a higher level support person does a root cause analysis, it can capture the root causes and set up an association with the solution that can be passed along to other operators," described David Langlais, vice president of marketing at Proactivenet in Santa Clara.

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Proactivenet is a self-learning tool that baselines the performance of all the attributes it learns about to determine what a normal operating environment is for each attribute. "We have intelligent thresholds that follow the performance of each attribute, whether its CPU utilization, the number of SQL write requests waiting, the size of the bean pool on an application server—we follow thousands of things," described Langlais.

A scripting language also allows metrics taken outside the environment to be tracked as well. When one of the attributes goes outside its normal operating range, it is recorded as an abnormality and fed into a root cause engine that correlates the abnormality in a number of ways. Then a root cause case is built for why the abnormalities exist.

With the latest release, Proactivenet is "driving correlation on more configuration data, which is harder to do," said Corey Ferengul, analyst with Meta Group in Chicago. "Theyre also letting the customer do more custom correlation," he added.

Customers can, for example, create scripts that can trigger a detailed diagnostic action to get the top 10 CPU processes running on a system at the time an abnormality occurred.

Also new in 5.0 is the ability to create customized dashboards. The user interface was also enhanced with simplified navigation and at-a-glance status displays as well as expanded graphing capabilities. Proactivenet 5.0 can also gather data from WebLogic 7.0, Apache 2.0, including HTTPS support, Oracle 9i database, Solaris 2.9 for Server and Agent and Sun One Web Server 6.0.

The tool competes with Mercury Interactives Topaz Managed Objects Formula and other root cause analysis tools such as those from System Management Arts Inc.

The release is available now and pricing starts at about $25,000.

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