Cyanea Systems Corp. is readying new application management tools for the increasing number of IBM mainframe users moving their WebSphere pilots into production.
Cyanea/One for CICS Version 2.1, due this week, can monitor and manage composite transactions that flow from front-end WebSphere J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) applications into back-end Customer Information Control System applications on the mainframe, according to Cyanea officials, in Oakland, Calif.
The tool is unique in its ability to provide visibility into both J2EE applications and the back-end CICS applications that make up a complete transaction, officials said.
“Were doing work through WebSphere and J2EE, with pieces going into CICS,” said one Cyanea user familiar with the new release, who asked not to be named. “Right now, its a black box to us. Things get lost when they go over to the legacy CICS. We need to correlate from WebSphere to CICS and coming back.”
IBM will rebrand and market Cyaneas new tool as the Studio Application Monitor-CICS.
Market research company Gartner Inc. estimates there are about 1,000 IBM customers running WebSphere on the mainframe. But with 80 percent of the worlds business data residing in either CICS or IMS, demand is likely to grow in the future, according to Cameron Haight, a Gartner analyst in Houston.
Cyanea/One, which provides real-time problem determination and performance management of J2EE applications, will also gain the ability to trace method calls into IMS in the second quarter of next year, according to Cyanea officials.
The latest version of Cyanea/One also adds the ability to perform composite method tracing. When a transaction travels from WebSphere to CICS, the tool monitors the activity from both sides and correlates the data to logically view the transaction from end to end. The tool collects such data as application flow, CPU resource consumption and CPU use by transaction as well as other metrics.
The tool is made up of data collectors that reside in the application servers being managed and in a central server that consolidates data from the collectors into a historical database. A browser-based interface provides a view into the data for historical analysis and drill-down into thread-level details for problem determination. Cyanea/One can trace transactions across multiple systems and requires no modification of application code.
Pricing for Version 2.1 depends on the size of the mainframe housing the managed application.