IBM Delivers Composite Application Analysis Tool

Published: March 14, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Companies that want to gain a greater understanding of the behavior and performance of their composite applications running under WebSphere may want to check out new software unveiled by IBM last week. With Tivoli Composite Application Manager Basic for WebSphere version 6.0, which ships in April, IBM will deliver new capabilities for analyzing performance problems in J2EE applications running under WebSphere.

Tracing performance problems was a lot simpler in the olden days, when monolithic applications running on a single midrange or mainframe server were the standard, and problems could be tracked with simple debug and trace tools. However, under the new composite application development paradigm, where applications are cobbled together using resources from many different systems, it can be quite troublesome to narrow down the sources of performance problems, and fix it before it impacts end users.

This is the goal of IBM's Tivoli Composite Application Manager, or ITCAM. IBM offers several products in the ITCAM suite, including ITCAM for WebSphere, ITCAM for SOA (service oriented architecture), and ITCAM for Response Time Tracking. Each of these products supports OS/400 except for ITCAM for SOA. The product announced last week by IBM is ITCAM Basic for WebSphere 6.0, a scaled-down version of the full ITCAM for WebSphere product that only supports two Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) at a time. OS/400 is supported with ITCAM Basic for WebSphere 6.0.

ITCAM Basic for WebSphere 6.0 is designed for application developers and QA testers. The software helps users find the root cause of performance bottlenecks by displaying the details and profile of any single transaction, including the capability to adjust the granularity of the details to meet the needs of the user. It also provides memory diagnostics.

The software also features an "in-flight request search" capability that shows users the status of all requests yet to be completed. This feature can be tailored to target specific requests, or just those that are taking too long to complete, IBM says. The software also comes with a range of pre-canned graphs and statistical reports to illustrate the historical performance of the application and to help the user plan for future growth.

ITCAM Basic for WebSphere 6.0 requires DB2 and WebSphere Application Server version 5 or 6. If users don't have these infrastructure components installed on their machines, they can use an embedded version of the WAS and DB2 that ship with ITCAM.

The software can be loaded on the following machines: AIX 5.2 and AIX 5.3; Solaris 8 SPARC and Solaris 9 SPARC with the patch cluster dated June 2004; HP-UX 11i V1; Windows 2000 Server with SP4, Windows 2000 Advanced Server with SP4, Windows 2003 Server SE/EE; RHEL 3.0 (pLinux, xLinux, iLinux, zLinux), RHEL 4.0 (pLinux xLinux, iLinux, zLinux); SLES 8 (pLinux xLinux, iLinux, zLinux); and SLES 9 (pLinux xLinux, iLinux, zLinux).

In addition to these operating systems, ITCAM Basic for WebSphere 6.0 supports monitoring of JVMs running on: Solaris 10 on SPARC; RHEL 2.1; RFAS 4.0 and 4.1; and OS/400 V5R2 and V5R3 (but only on WAS 5.1 or above).

For more information, visit see IBM Software Announcement 206-052.