Elias and I talked about the core value proposition of SharePath. He summed it up well by saying, "We provide a breakthrough in IT reliability by enabling a bird's-eye, and detailed, view of how transactions perform across data center tiers. We believe this greatly reduces risks associated with rolling out new service offerings, optimizes applications and their use of infrastructure resources, improves the capacity planning process, and vastly improves the user experience by eliminating problems associated with applications that crash, hang or are simply just too slow."
SharePath software enables users to see transactions at a high level or at a granular level--from the click of an online user all the way through each hop of the data center. The software runs on a centralized server or on a virtual machine. Essentially, Correlsense sees transactions as being at the core of the data center; developing the ability to identify, track, monitor, and rapidly synthesize and analyze transactions at various stages during their existence enables support personnel to more efficiently and effectively respond to problem areas within the infrastructure.
GAINSCO Insurance's initial goal with SharePath included better data center-level monitoring, more efficient and rapid problem determination, good overall performance, and a better view of transactions at the Web portal tier. While working with SharePath, GAINSCO's desires for even greater information collection at the client resulted in Correlsense delivering a client-side function that collects detailed information such that actual transaction latency at the client side can be measured and every action taken at the client side can be logged, recorded and tracked.
"The client-side capability enables us to better track exact activity and to better determine the client's actual experience compared to what may be reported. Additionally, we have a much better view of latency beyond the Web portal all the way to the specific user," says GAINSCO's Wolf.
Unlike the top-down approach others take for monitoring activity associated with application transactions, Correlsense takes a bottoms-up approach. From this perspective, the company has been able to reduce setup time, lower overall maintenance costs, reduce the SharePath software overhead and build in more extensive auto-discovery capabilities into the product. "The Correlsense engineers are exceptionally smart people, and they built a smart product that that has exceptionally smart heuristics. The software learns your configuration and reports on literally everything," says Wolf. Indeed, SharePath does capture a lot of information, from four critical dimensions: actual user experience, application transaction specifics, network activity and overall infrastructure information specifically related to application transaction activity.
