Upcoming Events

Cloud Connect
Santa Clara
Feb 13-16, 2012

Cloud Connect brings together the entire cloud eco-system to better understand the transformation we're experiencing and promises to be the defining event of the cloud computing industry. Learn about the latest cloud technologies and platforms from thought leaders in Cloud Connect’s comprehensive conference.

Register Now!

More Events »

Subscribe to Newsletter

  • Keep up with all of the latest news and analysis on the fast-moving IT industry with Network Computing newsletters.
Sign Up

Email Email  Print  Share


APM Rolling Review: App Monitoring Made Really Easy

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Channel: Other, Networking & Mgmt, WAN & App Acceleration

  Download a Free PDF at NWCReports.com  

The Upshot

Claim
Indicative Software says its Service Director suite, which was developed from the ground up with a service-centric business view, can reduce the complexity of managing intricate application environments. The software is expensive, but Indicative says easy deployment means a return may be realized in days, not months. The company also touts ease of maintenance.
Context
Unlike competing configuration suites, such as those from HP/Mercury, IBM and CA/Wily, Indicative provides a single software package to manage all elements of the application environment. While many vendors now offer agentless synthetic transaction monitoring along with agent technology and real-time user monitoring, usually you need to buy multiple products for complex application environments. Indicative takes a welcome streamlined approach.
Credibility
We found Service Director incredibly easy to install, configure and maintain. If you need an agentless synthetic transaction product with the ability to leverage existing external data, Indicative should be on your shortlist. Yes, it's pricey, but top-down business-service views are where most organizations are headed, and Indicative excels here.

Indicative's Service Director

The first entry in our APM software Rolling Review is Indicative Software. Its Service Director offering, now in Version 8.0, promises a single-product approach to holistic application performance management that seeks to eliminate the complexity and ultra-high cost for multiple components that make many enterprises wary of traditional APM suites. In the Kickoff to this Rolling Review we discussed the myriad ways APM continues to vex organizations that have even a smidgeon of complexity in their application architectures. Traditional APM software is complex, costly—and required if IT is to have any hope of untangling the cause of performance slowdowns or discovering why network capacity is being gobbled by a particular application.

Fortunately for IT, newer vendors like Indicative are challenging established purveyors of management systems, like HP/Mercury, IBM and CA/Wily, by offering easier-to-use tools that are still plenty capable of monitoring enterprise environments.

For example, one area of confusion for IT groups is determining which type of data collection method is best for their enterprise. With synthetic transactions, software- and hardware-based probes, and client and application agents available, each vendor has a different philosophy. Indicative simplifies matters by relying on a combination approach, with agentless synthetic transactions at the core. This method focuses on a service-centric methodology to monitor the overall health and performance of the application. Service Director also has the ability to integrate into existing agents and data sources.


Page:  1 | 2 |3 |4 |Next Page »

Related Reading


More data-networking-management Insights



Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Network Computing encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Network Computing moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. Network Computing further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
 

Research and Reports

Hypervisor Derby
August 2011

Network Computing: August 2011

TechWeb Careers