Why insideApps

insideApps is a powerful yet affordable enterprise-class monitoring solution. By opening its software for the community to test, provide feedback and use extensively, determyne is building a product that by virtue of being tried and tested gives thousands of administrators peace of mind and real control of their critical applications. The highly popular LGPL License provides customers the flexibility to use parts of the product (e.g. to integrate with other monitoring tools) or perform additional customization that suits their business needs. A commercially licensed version is available for customers seeking additional functionality, support, and certification.

Drawbacks of Existing Solutions

Current solutions for monitoring complex J2EE applications and the services they expose involve looking at aggregated JMX metrics, log files, results of synthetic transaction playbacks, etc. While all these solutions are steps in the right direction, they fall short in providing real in-depth visibility into business transactions. This makes it difficult for application developers and administrators to rapidly pinpoint the source of performance issues. For example, if you are using a synthetic transaction player to record and playback your critical transactions periodically, the outcome of this solution still has two major drawbacks:

  • The basic assumption that the results of these transaction players represent what your actual users are experiencing is flawed. The requests used by this transaction player are predefined, pretested, and their network paths are more or less constant. If you can get visibility and rely on actual time taken for each request, rather than just some representation, it will provide more trustworthy and meaningful metrics upon which to base your SLA.
  • If these transaction players do flag performance or availability issues, the big question is: what next? The applications might be using a complex myriad of multi-tier J2EE containers, databases, LDAP servers. How do you go about finding the source of the problem? Looking at aggregated JMX metrics for each node, or for that matter looking at log files and trying to correlate events across nodes and tiers, is almost always a painful exercise in futility.

The Right Monitoring Approach

At determyne, we believe if you are serious about seeking control of your production environment, the right set of metrics are the ones that give you meaningful data on each individual transaction flowing through the system. There are products on the market that claim to do this. So why are they not being used extensively? Here are some reasons:

  • Price : Transaction tracing solutions have traditionally been niche features of larger and more expensive management platforms. There is general agreement that the transaction-based approach is probably the best monitoring strategy for J2EE applications, but high price points have kept these innovations beyond the reach of many customers.
  • Claim Vs Truth : The features provided by commercial transanction-based monitoring vendors have been incomplete, difficult to implement, and very expensive in terms of resource utilization.

Introducing insideApps

determyne's goal is to change the dynamics of the application performance monitoring industry. Our flagship product, insideApps, is the first Open Source transaction-based monitoring solution for J2EE applications. With its sophisticated end-to-end transcation tracing and reporting capabilities, insideApps helps application developers and administrators root out performance problems in multi-tier, high-load environments. The system is easy to install and deploy. And thanks to automated application and topology discovery features, you can begin monitoring your critical applications within a matter of minutes.

 

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