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At the Computer Measurement Groups CMG2003 conference in Dallas, service-level-management startup SeaNet Technologies on Monday will launch its first pair of products designed to measure actual user response times for Web services.
The New York firm, in making its transition from a consulting to a product company, created the SeaView/RTM (Response Time Monitor) and SeaView/PDB (Performance Database) to provide more accurate and comprehensive measurement of the end user experience.
“There is a gap between the users perception of service and ITs perception of it,” said Bernie Davidovics, CEO, founder and CTO of the New York company. “In many cases IT cant acknowledge theyre seeing the problem that the user is experiencing. To bridge the gap you have to measure the real thing—the actual end user service level. It cant be solved by the traditional methods of brute force, seat-of-the-pants or rule of thumb,” he added.
According to Davidovics, the company created the first tool that “makes it feasible to measure the end-user svc level for all users, all trans, all the apps and servers they hit all the time.”
The SeaView RTM is an appliance that mirrors IP traffic coming into a Web server and collects statistics on application, server and network response times. It provides real-time packet capture and analysis, and a single appliance can capture up to 20,000 packets per second. Multiple appliances, or probes can be used to scale the packet capture.
“We track every conversation pair, we give round-trip times, arrival rates. Were producing a very granular data source,” said Davidovics.
To analyze and manage the huge amount of data it collects, SeaNet uses its SeaView PDB, which serves as a data warehouse that combines its collected data with data from other sources to automatically determine the relationship between clients and servers. “We can tell you this is a Web server running Linux and is consuming transactions produced by this database server,” said Davidovics.
To manipulate the huge amount of data, the tool uses data-management technology from SAS Institute. “We built a system to capture 30 million rows of data, keep it for weeks and summarize it in seconds,” claimed Davidovics.
Used together, the SeaView RTM and PDB provide data mining for capacity planning and problem analysis. The tools are also integrated with System Management Arts Inc.s Application Services Manager and together provide richer root cause analysis of problems and their impact on business applications.
The tools will be available in the first quarter of next year, and prices start at $25,000, the company said.