Precise Monitors Transaction Performance With A Virtual Appliance

Precise, a provider of transaction performance monitoring (TPM) technology, is introducing its first ever TPM virtual appliance. The appliance can be easily downloaded to a virtual server, without the cost and complexity of provisioning a physical server and configuring an application to run on it. And Precise says the virtual appliance monitors transaction performance from the storage and database level all the way to the end user device.

TPM is a subset of application performance monitoring and is used by companies to make sure that applications are running in compliance with service level agreements with their customers and with various regulations they must follow.

The Precise solution differs from that of other vendors in that it tracks transaction performance from end to end, while others don’t track performance in storage or don’t track it on the end point device, said Zohar Gilad, an executive vice president for Precise. He cited Gartner research that 40 percent of transaction performance problems were traced to storage.

Other differentiators of the Precise virtual TPM appliance are its ability to operate in a dynamic cloud environment and its ability to not only identify a problem, but locate it and “sometimes suggest a solution,” Gilad said.

While virtualization is a widely accepted technology in enterprises, most of it is just for non-mission-critical applications, such as file servers and print servers, while adoption of virtualization in mission-critical applications is “in the low teens,” he said. The Precise TPM virtual appliance enables virtualization of mission-critical apps. An IT person can download the virtual appliance from the Precise Web site or load it from a USB drive, which includes the virtual server and a TPM database for the performance monitoring. The virtual appliance can be deployed in under a hour, a fraction of the time it would take to configure a physical server with TPM.

Transaction performance monitoring is becoming more important as businesses adopt cloud computing because they need to determine how their apps are performing in either a private or public cloud environment. Transaction performance is not just important for such applications such as e-commerce or financial trading platforms, but for even more widely used business applications such as SAP or Oracle, end-of-the-month accounting programs, insurance company actuarial calculations and more, Gilad said.

Precise is a 20-year-old company that went public in 2001, was acquired in 2003 by Veritas, which was subsequently acquired by Symantec in 2005. It was spun out of Symantec and acquired by private investors in 2008.

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