Quest Software Inc. is set to launch the first of its new application performance management tools that integrate several existing tools for Oracle Corp. E-Business Suite administrators.
Quest Application Performance Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite, due this week, pulls together updated versions of Quests Foglight monitoring and Spotlight diagnostics tools and integrates them with a new domain workbench for e-business.
The suite is designed to help database administrators and Web, network and application server managers pinpoint problems in complex, multitiered E-Business Suite applications. Its automated problem-detection tool notifies admins of problems and provides diagnostics for resolution.
Compared with products from competitors such as Veritas Software Corp. and BMC Software Inc., the Quest tools give users at Murad Inc. what they want, said Chris Soto, a DBA at the El Segundo, Calif., skin-care-products maker. “Some vendors focus on the database, others focus on the application server—and then you have generic providers. Quest rolls up Oracle E-Business Suite—thats what we need help with,” Soto said.
Quest provides an end-to-end performance perspective on transactions by tying end-user service levels to performance data and compiling performance statistics across each component in E-Business Suite, according to officials.
The Foglight component provides passive monitoring of transactions and active generation of synthetic transactions to test response times. Foglight can track all SQL responses that make up a transaction. It provides a network sniffer function that picks up traffic between the application and the database server and groups it into a business transaction.
“With Foglight, in a glance you can see how each part of your system is doing. The nice thing about it is that its color-coded. If you have something going on with the database or Web application server, it will light up yellow, orange or red. Without that, it makes it tedious to go through each node … to diagnose the problem,” Soto said.
When problems are detected, the Spotlight diagnostics tool provides a domain workbench for admins to trouble-shoot the problems. Problems are resolved from the Quest Central console.
The suite is available now, starting at $30,000.