Heroix is set to release this week an upgraded version of its application performance-management software that the company says can help customers understand how IT events affect the performance of business applications.

The company added event correlation, service-level agreement (SLA) monitoring, and baseline and thresholding features to Longitude Version 3, which the company says enables customers to monitor more network systems and devices and reduces the time to resolve problems.

For example, the baseline workload data feature eliminates trial and error when thresholding. Heroix says the software helps customers adjust thresholds for event notification based on how their networks behave to reduce false alerts. Another feature that automates notification and corrective action lets customers define under what conditions the software should generate an SNMP trap to capture data or execute on a command, the company says.

Industry watchers say Heroix, which serves mostly small to midsize businesses, updated the software and kept its ease of use. Longitude, which competes with Ipswitch's WhatsUp Gold, Mercury Interactive's SiteScope and products from Microsoft, can scale to address enterprise-level monitoring needs, company representatives say.

"It is still an easy-to-navigate product that IT professionals can learn as they use it without extensive training, and now it has capabilities to take corrective action and to relate IT events to business services," says Jasmine Noel, a principal analyst with Ptak, Noel & Associates. "And being agent-less, it's great for midsize companies that don't have the staff to update agents with every software release."

Longitude is installed on a dedicated server and makes use of industry-standard APIs to collect data from managed machines. The management software collects data from servers, operating systems and applications - and now with this release routers and switches.

"Going forward, the company could incorporate application-discovery features and relationship mapping into the software," Noel says.

For Tom Harrop, project manager for the IT infrastructure group at Fallon Clinic, in Worcester, Mass., the newly added device support makes his Longitude implementation more valuable.