ITrinegy Offers Packet-Based Network APM For The Masses

ITrinegy has announced a new generation of its AppQoS software that runs on an appliance and helps IT administrators solve application performance management (APM) issues associated with correlating data across different networked environments. The company is marketing a stand-alone app running on an appliance, which will be sold as a real-time operational application performance management tool, the company says. Unlike competing products, which require a master-slave relationship, the appliances are aware of each other and any appliance can collect data from any other appliance, the company adds. The product is particularly intended for companies that have not yet looked at APM because of its cost.

"What’s absolutely crucial for us is to understand how our network is being utilized," says John Soames, head of architecture of Adapt, a London managed services provider. "For our particular requirement, we needed to understand how traffic was, how fiber was being used. We needed to be absolutely clear if there were capacity issues and to understand the behavior." The other advantage of the appliance is that it doesn’t add to the burden of network traffic and can handle 10 Gbit Ethernet traffic. "If we’re taking an aggregated view, we didn’t want to stress the network by broadcasting from these appliances as well," he says.

The product is targeted at small to midsize businesses that are interested in implementing it with VMware, says Graham Wood, business development director for the Cambridge, U.K., company. The company does not at this point intend to release it for any other hypervisors, such as Microsoft’s Hyper-V, he says. The software gives IT administrators a high-level summary view using a Web 2.0 dashboard of network traffic, including who’s talking to whom, what applications end users are using and what application response is, he says.

The AppQoS product has undergone an upgrade in this latest version, taking what was already a fairly sophisticated network-based APM product and making it scalable by means of a new peer-to-peer architecture, says Jim Frey, managing research director for Enterprise Management Associates. Trinegy's approach of using small-footprint, low-cost instrumentation that is easy to deploy and requires virtually no administration is disruptive, he says. The total cost of ownership will fall into a range within easy reach of small to midsize enterprises, which need sophisticated application performance monitoring butcan't afford high-end enterprise products. This is packet-based network APM for the masses, he adds.

The software will initially be available only on an appliance, priced at $10,000 to $15,000, and is scheduled to be available at the beginning of next month. Comparable products cost $40,000 to $100,000, Wood says. The company expects to be able to offer the software separately soon. Models range from devices with two to eight 1-Gbit ports to the top-end unit, which has four 10-Gbit Ethernet ports. Competing products are typically aimed at the high end of the marketplace, while iTinergy is looking for users that are interested in implementing the technology on all of their network segments, not just the critical ones, he says.

See more on this topic by subscribing to Network Computing Pro Reports Strategy: Bringing APM to the Cloud (subscription required).