Precise Software Unveils New Module For More Visible Clouds

Precise Software has introduced Precise for Cloud, a new transaction performance management module aimed at helping organizations monitor and improve the performance of applications running in private clouds. Precise for Cloud is focused on helping  IT departments measure and ensure application quality of service (QoS), isolate and resolve performance problems and ultimately predict trouble before it affects performance. It also optimizes applications running on virtual and physical servers. The module is designed to work with VMware vSphere.

No doubt cloud computing is getting a lot of attention, and many research firms and industry experts think that's well deserved. Based on a new market survey, IDC predicts that by 2014, sales of cloud computing products or services will generate almost $56 billion in annual revenues. While cloud computing--and the underlying virtualized environments that let organizations consolidate infrastructure and pool application and communications resources--holds a lot of promise, IT organizations need far greater visibility into the cloud in order to identify and fix trouble spots and performance degradation.

Managing and monitoring applications running in virtual, cloud environments can be difficult, particularly since existing virtualization management tools from the hypervisor vendors are limited. These tools are designed to manage only the vendors' specific hypervisor software systems, and they can't be used to manage physical infrastructure. Therefore, it can be difficult to get complete picture of where problems exist when application performance falls. Equally challenging is the ability to automate the provisioning and activation of applications and services in a cloud-based computing model.

According to Precise Software, Precise for Cloud monitors every transaction through all application stack tiers from the URL through application, middleware and database to storage-spindle or any other component in the path for Java- and .Net-based custom applications, packaged applications such as those from SAP, Oracle and Siebel, and composite applications.

The software is designed to automatically detect, isolate and guide the resolution process for application performance incidents in order to increase the overall application uptime, Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), and the system's capacity to service increased transaction flows.The product can monitor virtual machine (VM) events, batch scheduling, database jobs such as extract, transform and load (ETL) processes and storage contention. It provides a consolidated dashboard with role-based views that are all based on the same historical data and real-time data culled in the Performance Management Database (PMDB).

Precise has been in the APM market for more than 18 years. In that time, the company and its products have undergone a number of transitions and acquisitions. Today, Precise can stand on its own with a distinctive approach to transaction monitoring that goes deeper than many competitors, focusing on underlying metrics versus simple round trip timings. By breaking down the application into its component parts and monitoring each piece, the product removes much of the guess work behind transaction monitoring and management.

The new cloud-based solution from Precise Software is a natural extension of its existing transaction performance management platform, according to report on the new module from Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). The research firm says the solution will help fill the gap in the management and governance of cloud and virtualized environments that could threaten to undermine any potential benefits.