Mercury Interactive on Monday will announce the latest in a string of partnerships its created with large application providers and server vendors.
The application performance testing, tuning and monitoring provider teamed up with BEA Systems Inc. to create WebLogic-specific monitors for Mercury Interactives Optane software suite.
BEA, which uses the Sunnyvale, Calif., companys load and functional testing software internally, will also recommend to its customers Mercury Interactives Optane business technology optimization software.
The integration work, which resulted in a pair of new WebLogic-specific monitors, allows Mercury Interactives software to provide a more granular view into how WebLogic 8.1 software is behaving and performing. In the pre-deployment phase of an application, Mercury Interactives LoadRunner load testing, WinRunner functional testing and ProTune performance tuning software can help users better test WebLogic application server code and troubleshoot problems before the application is rolled out into production. With Mercury Interactives Topaz monitor, users can drill down from a business process view into specific WebLogic metrics to more quickly troubleshoot problems in a production environment.
Mercury Interactive also worked with BEA to create correlation rules that take into account WebLogic servers to better determine the root cause of performance or scalability issues. “The work weve done covers three areas – infrastructure, application logic and the highest level of the business process. BEA gave us the ability at the (Enterprise Java Bean) level to connect those together to track down to which piece of the application server and library EJB would cause a problem,” described Yuval Scarlat, general manager and vice president of the testing and tuning business units at Mercury Interactive in Sunnyvale, Calif.
By being able to “more quickly diagnose performance problems,” the WebLogic integration promises to address a significant pain point, believes John Goode, vice president of technology at Benefitpoint Inc., in San Francisco, Calif.
“Right now it takes a lot of digging through code to find the (source) of a performance problem. Being able to drill down into the application server – we see value in that,” he said.
Mercury Interactive exploited the Java Management Exchange (JMX) interface in the WebLogic server to drill deeper into the behavior of the Java-based server, and into its Tuxedo communications bus. “The monitor can look at the transactions at the EJB level, break down the entire transaction and report back what happened from the point where the web service was initiated to the point where the customer saw the response on the web server,” described Julio Rojas, the BEA technology alliance manager for Mercury Interactive in Sunnyvale.
The BEA deal caps a series of partnerships Mercury has signed in the last year with application providers, systems integrators and now a Web applications server vendor. Those partners include Accenture, SAP, Oracle, Seibel and PeopleSoft. Mercury Interactives Scarlat believes its partners are finding that its tools can help smooth the deployment and potentially lower the total cost of ownership of the ISV applications and services.
BEA signed up because “their reach is impressive, their vision aligns nicely with ours, and they make us look good,” said Scott Edginton, vice president and general manager of BEA Global Software Partners, in San Francisco.
It also doesnt hurt that Mercury Interactive is the 800 lbs gorilla in the load testing space, and many of those vendors and their own customers are users themselves, pointed out Corey Ferengul, industry analyst at Meta Group Inc., in Chicago.
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