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Fresh off the rebuilding of its sales and marketing team and a new round of funding to the tune of $10 million, Dirig Software Inc. on Monday will launch a new integrated J2EE application performance management suite.
The new Dirig Application Performance Platform Version 4.5 allows operators to take a more business-oriented view of J2EE applications and infrastructure performance. It draws on the Nashua, N.H.-based companys Pathfinder technology developed last year, which allows the tool to relate performance statistics back to the application.
New capabilities extend the reach of what the Dirig software measures and goes beyond method-level statistics into the whole portfolio of J2EE applications that use a centralized, shared infrastructure at an enterprise.
“Were trying to close the gap between the shared infrastructure and the business users of it, by teasing out the different parts of the infrastructure used by different applications and by different lines of business than can then measure their business performance,” said Paul LaFrance, chief technology officer for Dirig.
Unique to the new platform is the Automapper, for which Dirig has applied for a patent. It can map the structure of J2EE applications within the server and among related servers, such as the back end database. It uses application source code, database and Web server configuration files to determine relationships between application components and infrastructure to automatically map dependencies.
“We look across all the tiers of the application from the user experience to the back end, and we collect [data] from all performance and systems management tools the customer has in place and use that knowledge of the application structure to organize the information and present it to developers, operations and lines of business, organized application-by-application,” described Ian Finley, Dirig director of product management.
“This is more than a profiling tool,” LaFrance echoed. “After we ascertain the blueprint, we can grab performance data and put it into the blueprint, from the user experience to the lowest level database statistic. So its not just the code. Were taking the silod performance data and giving it application context.”
Maps do not have to be manually edited. The tool automatically takes new business logic, runs it through the Dirig analyzer and automatically reconfigures the blueprint, LaFrance added.
Another component of the platform, the Data Harvester, uses the map to know which parts of the infrastructure to query, which agents to talk to and which SNMP agents to access for each application.
Once data is consolidated into the database, the Performance, Report and Portfolio manager generate reports from it, generates alerts broken down by technology issues or application portfolios, and creates business scorecards for line of business managers.
Today the tool works from data collected from Dirig agents, the Java Management Exchange interface (JMX) and from SNMP. Dirig plans to add adapters to collect data from other management products, starting in January.
The Dirig APP is due out at the end of the month. The Dirig APP tool starts at $50,000. Partner BEA will bundle the APP agent into version 8.1 of its WebLogic Web applications server.
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