Altaworks Corp. this month will take the wraps off the latest release of its Panorama application performance management software.
The Nashua, N.H., vendor is among a handful of J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) application management tools providers that offer deep access to the production workings of complex applications. Such tools help pinpoint problems arising from the interaction of components in multitiered Web applications.
Panorama 2.5 focuses on easing production application performance pain by working earlier in the application development cycle with quality assurance systems testers to find problems that crop up in the “logical plumbing” of J2EE Web applications, said CEO Dave Danielson.
“Theres a very painful range of problems with J2EE applications that are hard to pin down that are distributed and interrelated. And there is a group of interdependencies that only happen in production,” said Danielson.
Examples of such metrics include ODBC connection pools, Java virtual machines, Web page hits and processor consumption.
Panorama 2.5 allows test professionals to create a detailed performance test profile of an application in the QA test phase. Such profiles allow QA testers to learn about key performance indicators before the application goes into production.
New performance views in the latest release are similar to the graphs created by common load testing tools to help QA testers better understand and use the metrics generated by Panorama. By combining elements from Panoramas internal testing and external response time measurements gathered by common load testing tools, users can get a holistic picture of J2EE application performance.
Other new performance views allow QA testers to create graphs that plot load versus response time, load versus throughput or a combination of all three.
For load testing, Panorama 2.5 adds new lock limits that can be executed from a console that lets QA testers calibrate and then lock limits on all configured metrics. The lock limits allow users to perform experiments at the higher and lower user and transaction loads.
Panorama, which correlates data from multiple sources for performance analysis, also adds the ability to gather and correlate SNMP data as well as Apache server internal behavior data.
Panorama pricing starts at $50,000 for eight servers.