System Management Arts Inc., a network management software provider, is extending its reach into applications management with a new version of its InCharge tool that focuses on IBM WebSphere.
InCharge for Application Servers-WebSphere Edition can correlate application server performance with the health of Web servers, databases, load balancers and networks and can identify predefined problems, Smarts officials said.
Because it can trace problems to an application component, it generates a single alert instead of the multiple alerts created by different monitoring tools. That allows IT operations to accelerate the mean time to repair, to avoid involving application developers in trouble-shooting when the problem is out of their domain and to get an accurate view of the service impact of a performance problem, said company officials, in White Plains, N.Y.
The WebSphere Edition of InCharge ASM (Applications Services Manager) also automatically discovers WebSphere servers and the application infrastructure on which they rely, determines dependencies, and can automatically map the topology of the environment. Maps show interdependencies between elements such as database and Web servers as well as Java components such as Java servlets, Java virtual machines, and thread and connection pools.
The tool includes a library of predefined problems related to WebSphere, including clone availability, degraded servlets and connection pools, and exhausted thread pools on an application server. The tool can identify when an application, database or Web server process is down.
The generic InCharge ASM can be applied to any application, but it requires that users or systems integrators manually define “how your applications talk to each other and what applications they talk to,” said one user, who asked not to be named. “The advantage of having something like the WebSphere Edition is that it knows the topology—who connects to who and how. It makes deployment simpler.”
InCharge for Application Servers-WebSphere Edition is available now for use with WebSphere 5.0 and higher. Pricing starts at $20,000, and it requires Smarts ASM.