Symantec Expands Performance Management Software

Published: January 24, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Symantec this week announced an enhancement and a new addition to its application performance management (APM) software. The new offering, called the Application Service Dashboard, works with the software giant's i3 suite to give IT managers a bird's eye view of how multi-tier applications are behaving, while a new release of Insight Inquire gives managers availability and performance information specific to Web applications.

Symantec's APM suite of tools traces its roots to a company called Precise, which was acquired in 1993 by Veritas; Veritas, you will remember, was acquired by Symantec in 2005. The flagship offering in Symantec's APM suite is a suite of tools called i3, which stands for Insight, Indepth, and Inform. The updated Insight Inquire offering, despite the name, is not a member of the i3 suite of tools; although the product offers similar capabilities, has a similar name, and, in many cases, works hand-in-hand with i3 apps, Inisght Inquire is unrelated to i3, in large part because it takes an agentless approach to collecting and analyzing performance info.

i3 is an agent-based collection of performance analysis products that work atop a warehouse of performance data that is downloaded and stored on Oracle or SQL Server databases. Inisght correlates problems across multi-tiered applications, Indepth performs root causes analysis, and Inform is a reporting module that enables workers to answer questions such as "Do I or will I have a performance problem?" and "How is performance tracking over time?"

With the new Application Performance Dashboard, Symantec is working to centralize much of the performance-related data that had previously been stored across the various i3 products. The goal is to make it easier for IT managers and operators to view data on, for example, the CPU utilization of the SAP server, the activity on the Oracle database over a period of time, or the uptime of one's BEA Tuxedo servers. As Figure 1 shows, the Dashboard displays this information in graphical views.

Figure 1. The Symantec Application Performance Dashboard interface.

Out of the box, the Dashboard will ship with a dozen portlets that display specific performance indicators and Symantec plans to add more, says Rob Greer, director of product marketing for Symantec's server foundation and APM products. The product runs on Solaris, Windows, and Unix, and is available now for $300 per monitored socket (giving users a break on multi-core CPUs). The i3 suite starts at $1,500 per monitored CPU socket.

Symantec has big plans for the Application Performance Dashboard, and hopes to take it beyond simply being an abstraction layer for consuming i3 data. Much of this is because the Dashboard is based on the open-source Liferay portal software, which is based on the JSR-168 standard for portlets. "Were about supporting heterogeneous platforms, so users don't get locked in," Greer says.

In fact, customers can view any IT metrics delivered via the JSR-168 spec, not just metrics originating from i3, he says. "Where we're headed gives us some flexibility. Some customers are looking at ITSM," which stands for IT Service Management, he says. Indeed, chances seem good that Symantec may choose to build business performance management (BPM) metrics, not just IT metrics, into the Dashboard, although Greer is mum on the company's product roadmap.

The other major APM announcement is the release of Insight Inquire version 3.0. Whereas the i3 suite of tools digests performance-related info from a collection of agents, Insight Inquire is designed to spot performance issues in critical Web applications, basically by imitating an end user. The software sends out packets of data across the network, and analyzes the returns to see if they fall within accepted SLA standards. It also has the capability to pinpoint the server, network link, or another infrastructure component that's causing the problem.

With version 3.0, the company has worked to make Insight Inquire more robust and easier to use. The new version now includes an embedded database (based on Sybase ASE) for storing performance data, which reduces cost and speeds deployment. It also now supports the latest Web-based ERP applications from SAP and Oracle, including E-Business Suite, Siebel CRM, and PeopleSoft Enterprise.

Lastly, the "playback from studio" feature has been enhanced in version 3.0 with the capability to automatically replay recorded transactions to test application availability on a scheduled basis. It does this without requiring users to write scripts or perform other manual coding, thereby helping ensure that Web apps are always running as expected, the company says.

Insight Inquire 3.0 is available now. It costs $500 per managed (single socket) CPU.

In case you were wondering, Symantec sells a total of eight APM tools as part of its Symantec Data Center Foundation. This collection of tools is largely made up of products it acquired through Veritas, and is sold through the company's Data Center Management Group, which also sells the well-known Veritas NetBackup and high-availability software; the company's other two operating units are the Security and Data Management Group and the Consumer Group.

For more information on Symantec's Data Center Foundation tools, including APM, see www.symantec.com/enterprise.

                     Post this story to del.icio.us
               Post this story to Digg
    Post this story to Slashdot