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Application performance monitoring provider Heroix on Dec. 11 will continue to beef up its Longitude agentless IT infrastructure monitoring tool with new enhancements aimed at speeding problem resolution and broadening element coverage.
Longitude V4—which provides event management, alerting, automated resolution and monitoring for applications, servers and network devices—extends monitoring to SNMP devices, adds new reporting options, a new dashboard and enhanced tool navigation to speed troubleshooting and problem resolution.
The privately held Heroix made Longitudes event monitor the focal point from which different functions can be launched or from which different performance metrics can be monitored.
“We created a command and control component in the event monitor and added the ability to get more information from it,” said Ken Leoni, vice president of technical services at Heroix in Newton, Mass.
“If you have a problem and you want to turn an event off, you can do that, change a threshold, and you dont have to exit the [event monitor] interface, because its in the event itself.”
At the same time, users dont have to close the event monitor and navigate to other parts of the tool to get more information related to a problem.
“You can in the event grasp specific real-time and historical metrics, or watch a message real-time from within the event monitor, or launch a graphics facility that displays historical metrics from within the event monitor,” said Leoni.
That makes it more competitive with such performance management tools as BMC Softwares Patrol, Hewlett-Packards SiteScope (acquired with Mercury Interactive) and others, Leoni said.
“The things we did to the event monitor make it childs play to implement. A lot of other products take a long time to implement and have a steep learning curve. The way the event monitor is designed, everything is in one place,” he said.
Heroix in Longitude V4 re-architected the tool to make it more flexible in adding new functions without losing the ease of use existing users have come to expect with the tool, said Jasmine Noel, principal analyst at Ptak, Noel & Associates in New York.
“The event monitor focal point is what differentiates Longitude from all their older versions. The way theyve architected the product makes it easier for them to add on more functions like the event monitors, so you can do everything from one dashboard. Going forward the product set will get richer and richer and still maintain its intuitive ease of use,” she said.
The new release in fact includes a new performance statistics dashboard that provides a real-time display of different components that make up a multi-tiered application.
The dashboard, which can be customized, can display statistics on servers running Windows, Linux or Unix, as well as statistics on applications, databases, Web servers, e-mail and network devices.
Data can be displayed on timelines, dials and thermometer graphs and marked with warnings when critical thresholds are breached.
That can help avoid finger-pointing in IT shops that manage different infrastructure elements in silos, according to Leoni.
The diversity of server environments that Longitude can monitor is what drove users at Bunker Hill Community College in Charlestown, Mass., to adopt the tool, according to contract CIO Bret Moeller.
“We had Sun, Microsoft, Novell and Unix servers, and Heroix works on all those platforms. We even look at Macintosh servers with that. Its very powerful. You can throw any type of a server at it, and Heroix would monitor and report on those servers for us,” said Moeller, who works for outsourcer Campus Works Inc.
A new reporting portal allows operators to create and publish reports geared toward the CIO or business line managers to show “what kind of service youre providing,” said Leoni.
Longitude V4 also adds the ability to monitor SNMP devices as well as gather and consolidate Windows event log data within the event monitor.
It is due on Dec. 11.