Confio Software yesterday announced availability of Ignite 8, a major expansion of its database performance solution. Ignite 8 expands the Ignite for SQL Server, Oracle, DB2 and Sybase products to include comprehensive performance monitoring in combination with the response-time analysis for which Ignite has been known.
In past product versions, Ignite was often used in conjunction with other database monitoring tools to track server health and monitor current session activity, with Ignite providing advanced analysis based on its response time monitoring capability. With this latest release, Ignite now captures both the conventional health statistics and the more advanced response time data and provides intelligent correlation to deliver insight on the database condition and how it is affecting end-user experience. With this combination of response time, server health, and real-time session data, Ignite delivers a comprehensive monitoring and analysis solution for database administrators, developers and IT managers across the enterprise. "Ignite 8 is, from a feature standpoint, and an expansion of user capabilities, the biggest release that we have ever seen as a company," Don Bergal, chief operating officer at Confio, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Ignite 8 offers four key new features, Bergal notes. The product can analyze historical trend patterns ranging from 1 second to 1 year, with performance intelligence mining the history to find clues about problem sources. The product does systematic analysis of those patterns over those periods and identifies what might be changing, what might be interesting from a performance standpoint, notes Bergal. "There are many tools to do here-and-now analysis and tell you what is taking place very recently, but the other tools don't go back and do this systematic analysis of detailed data over long periods and cover everything from a second to a year."
Second, Ignite 8 also provides correlation of response time with health and session data, to show how server condition and session activity directly impacts query delays and how end-user response is affected.
And third, with Ignite 8, expert analysis and recommendations is automatically provided following the rules established by Confio's expert DBAs to find and prioritize the causes of bottlenecks hidden in the large volume of data. "We have taken those standard rules and baked them into the product so that it runs the analysis automatically over a long period, going way back in the history, and immediately identifies what our expert DBAs would advise."
And the fourth key element of the new release is an "alarm trail" which Bergal describes as "a path through the forest of all the different indicators" that leads DBAs from high-level views down through detailed root cause information simply by clicking alarm icons to follow the correct path to resolution.
Ignite 8 supports Oracle 8i, 9i, 10g, 10g; SQL Server 2000,2005, 2008; DB2 LUW 8 and above; and Sybase ASE 12.5 and above. Free trials can be downloaded here.