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Symantec on Jan. 23 will update its application performance management suite with a new, customizable portal.
The i3 suite, which allows application managers to detect, isolate, troubleshoot and report on the root cause of application performance problems across multitiered applications, is gaining a dashboard that allows users to display performance and service-level metrics in the most efficient way for their IT organization.
“The i3 Application Service Dashboard allows our customers to extract specific data that their role within the business requires to shorten mean time to repair for problems,” said Rob Greer, director of product marketing for Symantecs application performance management solutions in Mountain View, Calif. “Instead of opening multiple browsers and looking at J2EE-level data, you can pre-populate what you want into a portal for a specific audience, depending on their role.”
The suite includes the Insight, Indepth and Inform management applications, which use agents installed in managed servers to collect performance data.
Insight performs correlation of metrics across different elements that make up a multitiered application, including Web, application and database tiers, as well as storage area networks and clients. Indepth collects deep, technical information in each tier, and Inform extracts data from a central warehouse of collected performance data for trending and reporting.
Unlike the existing Web-based interface for i3, the new dashboard provides a higher-level view and allows users to “create views more relevant to management,” Greer said.
Customization does not require that users learn a complicated scripting language because Symantec separated the dashboards presentation layer from the data collection and aggregation functions.
Symantec also enhanced Insight Inquire, an agentless synthetic monitoring tool for availability and performance of Web applications. Insight Inquire, which can be used with the i3 suite or as a stand-alone application, provides monitoring of Web transactions from an end-user perspective, and it includes the ability to generate alerts when SLAs (service-level agreements) are breached.
It can show, for example, the steps required for a customer to look up the balance of their checking account, and how long each element in that transaction takes to load. “You can see where something is taking way too long and then hand off to specific teams, who then use the i3 products to resolve issues,” said Greer.
In Version 3.0 of Insight Inquire, Symantec embedded a Sybase database within the product that stores performance and availability metrics. The embedded database helps speed and simplify deployment of the product.
Version 3.0 also includes an enhanced playback studio that increases the number of types of transactions that can be recorded and played back.
In addition, Symantec broadened the range of applications it can monitor. New applications supported include Oracle, SAP, Siebel and PeopleSoft applications as well as Citrix.
The i3 suite competes with broad-based application monitoring products from Hewlett-Packards Mercury acquisition as well as point solutions from vendors such as Quest (database monitoring) and CAs Wily acquisition (J2EE applications).
The new dashboard and enhanced i3 applications are available now.