Precise, a provider of transaction performance management software, has announced the availability of Precise 9.0. "The focus of this release is real-time transaction performance management for cloud applications and especially Java applications running on the cloud," Precise executive vice president Zohar Gilad tells 5 Minute Briefing.
According to Precise, while there are quite a few solutions for cloud infrastructure management, none are able to handle mission-critical applications. Ensuring application quality of service on top of virtual infrastructure is challenging, because old problems do not go away, virtual infrastructure is in constant change, and contention for shared services is a daily staple, the company explains. Moreover, an application transaction problem has become much more difficult to pinpoint, due to the multiple virtualization layers around the application, database and storage.
Precise 9.0 aims to fill this void by providing application, database and storage managers a "single pane of glass" to analyze transactions in flight, isolate problems, and even guide resolution. Precise 9.0 tracks every transaction from end-users all the way down to the storage level, providing visibility to application owners. "And, we report on these transactions in real time," says Gilad. The solution automatically finds the cause of application transaction problems in the Java code, database or storage, accelerating repair of application slowdowns, and it also visually presents the impact of VM events on application performance, allowing application owners to reduce risk of failure.
"The old problems that prevent applications from scaling don't go away, and a new virtualization layer actually makes it a lot more difficult to find the origin of a problem once it happens," says Gilad. Additionally, he notes, "The cloud model is heavily dependent upon shared services which is a good thing, but the flip side of that is that you have a lot more possibilities for application contention on resources."
Precise helps customers establish a baseline of the application performance and behavior before moving to a cloud configuration and then after to manage to the quality of service, and, if there if there is a problem, automatically finds where the problem is and even guides the resolution process, explains Gilad.
There are a number of specific customer-requested features in 9.0 to support real-time monitoring in the cloud, Gilad says. Precise 9.0 tracks transaction in real time, while they are "in-flight," or even hanged; displays business level dashboard of application business process performance; and visually presents the impact of VM events on application performance.
For real time automated troubleshooting, Precise automatically isolates application problem to a specific user, location, transaction, application instance, IT tier, virtual machine, and server; automatically finds application transaction problems root cause in the Java code, database or storage, accelerating repair of application slowdowns; and automatically optimizes for database and storage performance.
In addition, with enhancements for SAP, SAP operators and SAP Basis administrators can now seamlessly track SAP and SAP applications performance from the web tier through SAP Java Stack, ABAP stack RFC calls, down to the database tier and storage tier.
Enhancements in Precise for Oracle users include improve time-to-resolution of SQL-based performance degradation. Precise 9.0 also incorporates automatic findings and suggestions for problem resolution, and Precise 9.0 statistics now highlight activity and object usage information at the step level, which accelerates root cause analysis.
Precise 9.0 supports all the leading application platforms and enterprise J2EE software packages. Latest enhancements for J2EE include the ability to identify unbalanced JVM clusters; detect performance problems in the J2EE tier and isolate the root cause; and find hidden memory problems. For more information, go here.