TeaLeaf strengthening apps management

TeaLeaf Technology has released products to help IT managers better tackle Web application performance.

Version 4.5 of its flagship RealiTea Web application and site management software now features more automated event analysis. For example, the company says the software now can measure the impact of application performance issues against pre-defined business service-level goals.

Along with RealiTea 4.5, the company announced three new software add-ons to help IT staff rate application performance based on business objectives, to let service representatives gain visibility into the customer experience, and to let IT staff extract and correlate RealiTea data with data collected by third-party systems.

According to one industry watcher, TeaLeaf is working to correlate Web application and site performance back to the infrastructure supporting it, a task many vendors, such as Wily Technology and Quest Software, are addressing. Lynn Nye, founder and president of research firm APM Advisors, says managing Web applications requires an urgency that hasn't been applied to controlling applications in the past.

"IT shops are still in reactive mode when it comes to application performance, and it simply cannot be that way if mission-critical applications are on the Web," Nye says. "TeaLeaf is attempting to bridge the gap between the application performance guys and the networking guys to show how the two are linked."

RealiTea will alert staff to a poorly performing application and provide a replay of the end-user session so that IT managers can determine the exact cause of the performance degradation, which could range from an overloaded server to a poorly written application to a large graphic loading onto the Web page.

As more companies put important applications on the Web, more performance problems could crop up that IT staff are unfamiliar with and therefore find difficult to identify.

Marj Davies, director of Internet operations at online auto insurance company Esurance in San Francisco, says RealiTea opened her eyes to new Web site performance issues. For example, customers are required to enter their vehicle identification numbers (VIN) - a long string of number and letters - toward the end of a registration process. The way the application was programmed, when a customer made a mistake, the site prompted him to re-enter his VIN once, but after that, he was sent back to the home page, which erased all the data he already entered.

"We have no idea how many potential customers we lost because they got frustrated with the site," Davies says.

RealiTea software runs on a server in a customer data center, uses software and probe appliances to monitor Web application traffic, captures session data and identifies potential problem areas to prevent application failure. The server software monitors user sessions to generate alerts based on specified events, correlates any combination of captured data and provides detailed reporting. Software add-ons are installed on the central server.