Coradiant, Correlsense, AppDynamics, Nastel and dynaTrace: Better Together

Several vendors - Coradiant, Correlsense, AppDynamics, Nastel and dynaTrace - have teamed up to provide customers with best-of-breed, end-to-end application performance management (APM) solutions. The partnership centers on open application programming interfaces (APIs) they've used to create modules that provide turnkey integration between the vendors' products.

The partnerships are part of an effort spearheaded by Coradiant. The effort first got underway back in May 2009 when Coradiant and dynaTrace partnered to integrate their offerings. The combination of Coradiant's Web performance management and dynaTrace's application performance visibility and diagnostic software created an offering that Ali Hedayati, president and COO of Coradiant, says included application management from the front-end, user perspective all the way back to the monitoring of back-end application servers. "This combined two best-of-breed solutions that were fully integrated with correlation capability and drill down functionality," Hedayati says. "That program went really strong."

Since then more customers have asked for similar offerings, and Coradiant began talking with other vendors about partnerships, and began crafting its Open Application Visibility Architecture, unveiled last week. The architecture is based on the integration with dynaTrace and is designed to provide customers with a seamless, end-to-end solution for monitoring application performance.

Coradiant customers can purchase the Coradiant TrueSight Application Visibility Connector which will provide tight data and console integration between Coradiant's and its new partners' software. Now, for example, Correlsense's SharePath IT Reliability platform designed to monitor all transactions of an application in real-time can work with Coradiant's TrueSight appliances that combine real-time Web traffic, intelligent session processing capability, and more. The integration provides insight into how data center components impact end-user experiences and service levels, the two companies say.

Coradiant and Nastel have created integration between Nastel's AutoPilot, APM software that features an event processing engine for predictive alerting, and real-time monitoring of applications, middleware, and transactions and their relationships with underlying infrastructure, and Coradiant's TrueSight. Coradiant and AppDynamics have also built links between their products.Coradiant's TrueSight provides Web application performance management to IT operations teams, while the other vendors provide tools to help developers find problems in the code, says Bernd Harzog, an analyst with The Virtualization Practice. "These combinations mean that now customers will get an integrated view across ops and app support from the integration of the products that serve these two audiences." Harzog says that the technical integration has been done, and customers need only the specific modules from the vendors to enable the bi-directional sharing of information, which can be viewed from any of the vendors' consoles.

Jean-Pierre Garbani, VP and principal analyst with Forrester Research, agrees. "The end result is a significant enhancement for the AppDynamics, Nastel, Correlsense and dynaTrace solutions as Coradiant is a leading product for end user performance monitoring," he says. "Integration is mostly about reporting the Coradiant metrics in the APM dashboard, so it should be relatively straightforward, and the purpose is to have a single view of all metrics from Coradiant and from the APM probes. I think that end user monitoring is a key element of APM and that these partnerships provide customers with a leading solution that complements the value of the diverse APM solutions."

Coradiant's Hedayati says that while the partnerships are complex - as the partners also compete to a certain degree - the value proposition was strong enough to overcome the complexities. "We all compete against the big Kahunas like CA and Quest. They don't have better solutions than us individually, and theirs are bits and pieces that don't integrate well. Their strength is their market position," he says. "But now the customer has a complete solution and they can have the best at probably better cost than they would get from CA. We all have a common cause and a common goal. These partnerships are strong for the partners and for the market."