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INETCO Systems, a provider of network-based application performance monitoring (APM) software, announced its latest APM release, INETCO Insight 5.3.
The new release makes it easier and faster for IT operations teams to isolate enterprise service issues in service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications deployed within private, public and hybrid cloud environments. Version 5.3 is now available for testing and purchase.
“With INETCO Insight 5.3, IT operations teams dealing with more and more enterprise services running across distributed application architectures and third-party networks can now track each individual transaction as it passes through any infrastructure environment,” Bijan Sanii, president and CEO of INETCO, said in a statement. “This fresh, lightweight approach to application performance monitoring yields 65 to 75 percent faster problem resolution and removes the risk of application failure or slowdowns going undetected when our customers opt for more cost-effective environments such as virtual data centers or the cloud.”
INETCO Insight 5.3 takes a lightweight approach to monitoring consumer devices and business applications running within distributed application environments. The software offers visibility into how all parts of a customer’s enterprise system are performing by tracking the entire lifecycle of every enterprise service transaction without the use of agents, extra traffic loads or code changes.
“The application performance monitoring business is in the process of being reinvented by new vendors who are building new products that meet the new requirements of managing applications in virtualized and cloud-based environments,” Bernd Harzog, a principal analyst at The Virtualization Practice, said in a statement. “INETCO is translating its strength in network-based application performance monitoring into a compelling, cloud-ready offering with INETCO Insight 5.3.”
INETCO Insight 5.3 can capture transaction traffic from thousands of distributed collection points that are on or off the enterprise network. These collection points can be network-based or host-based. The solution also can reassemble multi-hop, multi-step business transactions in real-time using simple user-defined rules. And with INETCO Insight’s mobile alerting interface, IT operations teams can identify and isolate transaction issues from anywhere using their Android, iOS or Blackberry mobile or tablet device. The new release ships with a free HTML 5 client optimized for smartphone and tablet screens.
Based in Vancouver, Canada, INETCO has been around since 1984 and has had a presence in financial markets. Now, with the release of Insight 5.3, INETCO is looking to make a larger horizontal move into more markets, company officials said.
INETCO started out designing communications gateway products for high-reliability, high-performance transaction networks, providing connectivity of dial-up POS and ATM terminals, leased-line ATMs and legacy network protocols to TCP/IP networks, transaction hosts/switches and third-party EFT processors. The POSway and BankLink communications gateway products helped INETCO establish a presence for its rich protocol expertise in the banking and payment processing industries.
In 2003, INETCO engineers conceived the idea for INETCO Insight, a product architected to monitor complex transaction systems. First released to market in 2008, INETCO Insight is now deployed around the world in a variety of payment processing and high-volume financial transaction environments, the company said.
INETCO’s move to make a bigger splash in the APM market comes as competition is increasing with the market growing. Gartner identifies Compuware as a leader in the space, along with others such as Opnet, CA, AppDynamics, BMC, IBM, New Relic and Quest—which Dell acquired in September 2012.
INETCO Insight 5.3 Launches Into Hot APM Market
According to Gartner, APM has become a central focus for IT operations, and growth in spend continues while the market evolves rapidly. Gartner estimated that the global spend for APM software was $2.14 billion in 2012, 9 percent growth from the $2 billion spent in 2011.
Infighting among key players is not uncommon as competition heats up. For instance, in April, CA sued AppDynamics for patent infringement. CA said it is seeking undisclosed damages for lost profits and legal costs and an injunction against AppDynamics prohibiting the infringement of CA Technologies patents and the misuse of the company’s intellectual property.
The complaint alleges that AppDynamics, founded by Jyoti Bansal, a former CA Technologies and Wily Technology employee, infringes three important CA Technologies APM patents. CA Technologies took ownership of key APM patents, including the three described in the complaint, when the company acquired Wily Technology in 2006 for $375 million.
Meanwhile, in addition to INETCO’s May 29 announcement, Dell, on May 28, announced the release of Foglight APM 5.9. And earlier this month, Compuware introduced an APM-as-a-service offering.
Foglight APM allows IT to see every step of a transaction for a complete picture of the end user’s experience with an application. The software also provides users with the exact execution path of an application and other details through the entire application stack from the code and middleware, all the way down through the operating system and hypervisor.
Foglight APM links all application layer traces back to the end user, creating a single customer-centric transaction model that provides IT with actionable information to help them better understand and manage the technology. With its Transaction DNA technology, the new release of Foglight APM can also facilitate improved collaboration between IT operations and developers, Dell Software officials said. The Transaction DNA technology unifies disparate data sources under a common business-oriented framework, enabling the two groups to work on the same problem as a team to resolve it quickly.
“Foglight APM 5.9 represents a significant breakthrough in collaborative customer-centric APM, with user behavior monitoring, end-to-end transaction analysis, and contextual forensics that provide critical insight for both IT and the business,” John Newsom, executive director of application performance monitoring at Dell Software, said in a statement. “The best measure of application delivery is the end-user experience, and Foglight APM offers a more dynamic, real-time, transaction-centric view of the entire application, including every aspect of every end-user interaction. With Foglight, application support teams can see the exact end-user experience, and isolate problems to application code within the browser or on the application server, external third-party service calls, the application infrastructure, or anywhere else in the execution path.”
Foglight APM combines data collected from both the network and within the browser to continuously report on 100 percent of user session activity, including performance breakdown and errors, navigation timing and keyboard/mouse events. It also features a Transaction Trace Repository for storage and analysis of high-volume, high-granularity data. This repository is designed to address the big data problem in APM by capturing all performance and content details for every click by every Web user. A turnkey appliance provides a single point of management and scales to support the largest user volumes with security and compliance adherence.
“We chose Foglight to monitor and replay the experience of users interacting with our Web applications, and have been thrilled with the results,” Hoang Nguyen, vice president of applications at LQ Management, which operates La Quinta Inns, said in a statement. “With Foglight, we are able to identify transactions that could affect our revenue or customer confidence. We look forward to becoming even more proactive with the new customer-centric approach and Transaction DNA technology in Foglight APM 5.9.”