AmberPoint shines light on Web application performance

Management vendor AmberPoint is set to ship software at the end of the month that it says will help corporations monitor and maintain prescribed performance and availability levels for their Web services applications.

The company’s Service Level Manager (SLM) can be used to track performance levels to individual users, sniff out and correct potential problems before they escalate, and identify long-term usage trends.

SLM is complementary to AmberPoint’s Management Foundation, which is used for real-time monitoring. SLM, which can be used in conjunction with Management Foundation, takes a more historical look at Web services usage and performance to determine what users are doing and what level of service they are experiencing.

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Management vendor AmberPoint is set to ship software at the end of the month that it says will help corporations monitor and maintain prescribed performance and availability levels for their Web services applications.

The company’s Service Level Manager (SLM) can be used to track performance levels to individual users, sniff out and correct potential problems before they escalate, and identify long-term usage trends.

SLM is complementary to AmberPoint’s Management Foundation, which is used for real-time monitoring. SLM, which can be used in conjunction with Management Foundation, takes a more historical look at Web services usage and performance to determine what users are doing and what level of service they are experiencing.

Management has become a glaring concern for corporations deploying multiple and integrated Web services. Users that begin to integrate multiple Web services into a business process or composite application will need management capabilities to ensure the integrity of those integrations, experts say.

While work on management standards is just getting started, vendors such as AmberPoint, Actional, Blue Titan, Confluent, Digital Evolution, Infravio and Talking Blocks are rolling out products to manage Web services.

Blue Titan this week announced that it was integrating its Network Director with BEA Systems’ data integration software, Liquid Data for WebLogic.

“There are a number of products that let users monitor service-level agreements,” says Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with ZapThink. “But what fewer products do is provide control of software that drives those agreements. AmberPoint has the alerting system as well as the control.”

Bloomberg says the challenge that AmberPoint and other start-ups face is the small window of opportunity they have before major vendors such as BMC Software, CA, HP and Tivoli enter the market.

“AmberPoint seems to be making the right moves, and it has made some good partnerships, including one with Microsoft,” he says.

SLM is aimed at IT and business managers and can be deployed to present a customized interface for each class of user. IT executives can see how applications are performing, and business managers can ensure that users are getting agreed-upon service levels.

SLM lets administrators set parameters for quality of service, such as response time, and the actions to be taken if those parameters are not met, such as activating load balancing. Usage of Web services applications can be tracked and prioritized based on a particular audience, be it a single user, a set of users or a department.

“SLM looks at how Web services interact with users and with other Web services,” says Ed Horst, vice president of marketing for AmberPoint. “We are less worried about looking at packets.”

SLM also has a feature called Active Roles that spots trends in performance and lets users set policies to correct situations that might affect those performance levels.

AmberPoint runs on Windows and various flavors on Unix. SLM is priced starting at $50,000.