Niche application performance management vendor Confio Software will combine the deep dive it does into Oracle database operations with a deep dive into the Java applications that rely on those databases in a suite it is expected to launch in June.
Confio carved out a place among vendors such as Quest Software, Symantec and the former Precise Software, now a part of Symantec, with its unique wait time analysis, which looks at where in the database time is being consumed in the processing of user requests.
“We extend our wait time method and detailed analysis up to the Java application. We measure individual time spent on each Java method and we correlate it to whats happening in the database,” said Don Bergal, COO of the 4-year-old Boulder, Colo., company.
When it takes too long to validate a credit card number, for example, “we find which Java method is consuming that time. We can tell you what its waiting on in the database and where the lock or specific bottleneck is,” he added.
The wait event analysis focuses on whats most important, said user Don Nawrocki, director of data and storage management at GSI Commerce in King of Prussia, Pa.
“Its a neat way to look at the problem, because in the end what people really care about is how quickly the actual database will return the results,” said Nawrocki at the e-commerce hosting company.
GSI Commerce used the previous version of the tool to solve a critical wait time issue for its ecommerce customers just prior to the biggest shopping day of the year: the Friday after Thanksgiving.
“When turned the product onto the problem, we found the source that gave us lots of wait time, and within 24 hours we fixed the problem. That was right before Black Friday, which is huge for us,” said Nawrocki.
Although Precise Software also provides wait event analysis, Confios Ignite for Oracle, targeted at Oracle database administrators, is unique in that its faster to install, owing in part to the fact that its agentless.
“We use a different set of interfaces that allows us to take a snapshot of the memory Oracle uses. We pull it back into our repository, analyze it and then reassemble it. That gives us a complete picture without the agent on the target box,” said Bergal.
“It allows you to add things to it quickly without affecting your live environment,” said Nawrocki.
“Theres no software to be installed and no change control needed to make live production box changes,” he added.
The new Ignite for Java component of the suite extends the same processes to J2EE applications running on WebLogic, JBoss, WebSphere or other Java Web application servers.
Ignite for Oracle 6.0 also adds the ability to pinpoint the source of problems in Oracle Real Application Clusters that share the processing load across multiple servers, and it adds the ability to view longer term trends.
Ignite for Oracle 6.0 as a separate offering is available now. The suite, which will be extended to support other databases, is due by July.