Precise Unveils Managed Service For Application Performance Management

Application performance management vendor Precise has unveiled a managed service offering featuring its Transaction Performance Management software. Transaction Performance Management is designed to help companies monitor the performance of applications and systems, identify performance trends, and troubleshoot and resolve issues. Precise says it developed the service, called Precise Managed Service Provider, to ease the complexities of managing application performance and to help improve IT's quality of service. 

According to Zohar Gilad, executive vice president of Precise, IT departments are well-versed in measuring and managing the uptime of servers and in measuring network capacity. "But not many know how to measure and manage application performance and quality of service," he says. In addition, many organizations have pressing application performance needs and don't have the time it can take to buy software and implement it in-house. Moreover, many organizations are still facing budget constraints that have severely restricted capital purchases.

Precise MSP, which the company has been developing for more than a year and a half, takes aim at all of these limitations, Gilad says, by providing automated transaction performance monitoring as a service that's "remotely managed, via a VPN, by black-belt experts of TPM." The experts manage application quality of service around the clock, isolate transaction performance problems, and guide resolution. Customer data and the Precise Transaction Performance Management software remain on internal servers at the customer site.

To get the service, customers need to install the Precise TPM server, which provides the necessary VPN access and TPM software. Typically, a customer will start with one application, and Precise staff will help instrument the application so that performance metrics and other data can be collected. Once a baseline of performance is created, the Precise team can then make suggestions as to how the customer might improve an application's performance. 

Each customer has a technical account manager overseeing the service, and after a few days of use, the account manager will advise the customer on tasks such as how to build reports and dashboards, set service level agreements, and configure alerts. The customer can access the Precise TPM server any time to configure it or analyze data.Gilad says there are customers, including financial institutions, that are already using the new service. Some have been using Precise TPM software internally and now want to take advantage of the managed service, which makes it possible for someone to devote full attention to performance monitoring and to build continual improvements in processes. 

Precise is working with channel partners, including Savvis, a provider of cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions for enterprises. Savvis has selected Precise MSP to ensure the performance of enterprise applications for its more than 2,500 unique clients.

There are a variety of application performance management products on the market today, and some are available as managed services, notes Julie Craig, research director, application management, with research and consulting firm Enterprise Management Associates. Craig points to services from Keynote and Gomez, which offer services for monitoring Web application performance. "The difference with Precise is that they are not only providing transaction performance, they also provide a basis for troubleshooting and root cause analysis," Craig says. Compuware has been building out its offerings, which include both the troubleshooting and analysis tools it offers and the Web application performance monitoring capabilities from outside the firewall that it added when it acquired Gomez in 2009.

Craig also says Precise's architecture makes its service somewhat different from other offerings. "Transaction performance measurements come from instrumentation inside the firewall; the metrics collected go into the Precise cloud, via the secure VPN, to be managed as a 'managed service.' This provides very deep monitoring of transactions from an 'inside the firewall' perspective, with in-depth performance measurements and root cause analysis capabilities."

Available now, Precise MSP is priced by quantifying the size of the application to be monitored. The size is determined by the number of CPUs the application server has. Pricing for the service can range anywhere from $20,000 a year to hundreds of thousands a year, according to Gilad.