Mercury Interactive Corp. came out with both barrels blazing last week, introducing an integration alliance with Citrix Systems Inc. and a release of its SiteScope monitoring tool that is integrated with its ActiveWatch performance monitoring service.
Mercury, of Sunnyvale, Calif., is teaming with Citrix to create the first native load testing and performance monitoring tools for Citrix MetaFrame clients. Mercurys LoadRunner software will allow testing of Citrix clients using the Citrix ICA, or Independent Computing Architecture, protocols to better predict the performance of new applications running on MetaFrame terminal servers.
At the same time, Mercury will incorporate support for MetaFrame servers in its Topaz performance monitoring tool. Together, the enhanced offerings, due by May, will provide pre-deployment load testing and post-deployment monitoring. Without such tools, users have had to develop custom testing scripts and manually extrapolate results, according to Greg Martin, manager of client/ server and messaging solutions at Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., in Miami. “This will take it to the next level and greatly simplify what we do today using manual extrapolation methods and custom scripts.”
Meanwhile, Mercurys Freshwater Software subsidiary will take the wraps off a new version of its SiteScope monitoring software that is integrated with Mercurys ActiveWatch Web monitoring and diagnostics.
Officials expect the combination will provide the first hosted service to correlate system monitoring and end-user application performance data, from inside and outside a corporate firewall.
That kind of correlation was “intuitive” for one Mercury customer, who opted to manually combine the two to be able to get both internal and external views of how critical applications were behaving.
“I had merged them manually together on a pair of monitors I keep in the application area. If something changes on the inside, I can see how that affects the outside,” said Michael McClung, director of IT services for Day Runner Inc., in Fullerton, Calif.
Along with the ActiveWatch integration, SiteScope Version 7 adds the ability to monitor 16 new environments, including BEA Systems Inc.s WebLogic, IBMs WebSphere and DB2, Simple Object Access Protocol, Microsoft Corp.s SQL Server, Oracle Corp.s Oracle9i, and others.
The new release also adds the ability to create monitoring templates to speed SiteScope deployment in large data centers with multiple servers.
ActiveWatch integrated with SiteScope is available now and is priced at $7,600 a year per 100 metrics monitored. LoadRunner for Citrix starts at $52,000 for 50 concurrent Citrix users, and Topaz for Citrix starts at $60,000. Both are due within 60 days.
