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With many users leery of agent-based approaches to collecting data, more application performance management providers are focusing on centralized appliances to measure end-to-end response times.
Veteran service delivery management provider Adlex Inc., of Marlboro, Mass., this week will launch a new version of its IT service management appliance that provides service-level metrics based on real user experience. Meanwhile, rival Network Physics Inc. is readying a distributed version of its NP-2000 appliance that provides an enterprisewide view of application traffic.
Joining the handful of appliance-based providers will be Peakstone Corp. with the launch next month of its first appliance.
The Adlex ITvisibility appliance provides real-time analysis of usage, availability and performance for applications running across public and private networks. ITvisibility measures response times for IP-based applications as well as for Web applications.
ITvisibility can be used to locate troublesome infrastructure elements and speed fault isolation.
The passive listening device, which connects to the span port on a data center switch behind the corporate firewall, also understands session-level activity and can calculate usage, response time and availability. That data is passed to a central database for analysis.
ITvisibility, which includes the appliance as well as a report server, is available now.
Such passive, auto-learning appliances are gaining ground in the market because they are easier to deploy and administer than agent-based collection, experts say. They provide insight into real user experience, which synthetic transaction testing cant provide.
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The tools are also getting greater acceptance because they can reduce the time it takes to isolate problems, said Dennis Drogseth, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates Inc., in Portsmouth, N.H.
“Most of the time is spent determining what the problem is versus having to fix it,” Drogseth said. “If you can localize the problem and do it intelligently [by] looking at the interdependencies, systems and networks—thats a tremendous value.”
“It probably saves 35 percent of the troubleshooting time,” said Allmerica Financial Corp.s Brett MacNutt, operations manager in network services, in Worcester, Mass. “It narrows down the search to a particular platform and gives you real data to work with,” said MacNutt, who uses Adlexs ITvisibility.
As users realize the value of the appliances, more enterprises are opting to install the devices in multiple locations, rather than just a single data center, Network Physics officials said.
To better scale its technology for more enterprisewide deployments, Network Physics next month will launch an appliance that provides an aggregated, end-to-end view, according to company officials in Mountain View, Calif. The appliance, in beta testing now, performs traffic analysis in a distributed fashion and forwards the results to a central location for aggregation.
Peakstone next month will launch its Peakstone Performance offering, which will feature the Sunnyvale, Calif., companys first appliance and move its offerings toward more predictive and preventive performance management.
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