ProactiveNet last week announced an updated version of its flagship software that the vendor says can help customers better relate IT performance to specific business processes and track application performance.

The software, ProactiveNet 7.0, includes a Business Services Management console that lets customers view the relationships among applications, such network components as routers, servers and databases, and user machines, the company says. With this view, customers can determine more quickly the cause of a problem and minimize the effect on users.

The company also reworked the console to have configurable service-manager and operations-manager interfaces. For example, the former might report on a process, such as order entry slowing down, while the latter would report on the servers and network devices most likely associated with the degradation.

"ProactiveNet does not monitor for performance in the way the traditional management vendors do," says Jean-Pierre Garbani, a research director at Forrester Research. He explains the company can pinpoint application-performance problems by taking a vertical view of the application from the user machine to back-end systems.

While ProactiveNet competes with BMC Software, CA, HP, IBM and Mercury Interactive, traditional management systems can take a more all-encompassing view of network elements, but they may not as rapidly report the performance problem or pinpoint its exact source, he says. "With its approach, ProactiveNet does a lot of the correlation for the IT managers to determine how an event on a server impacts, say, the end user."

ProactiveNet 7.0 uses statistical analysis to determine the normal operating behavior of networks, applications and servers, and alerts network managers when abnormal patterns have occurred. This information can help users prevent a problem before it slows network, application and Web site performance, the company says.

ProactiveNet comprises several components: collectors that span the entire application-delivery path, a centralized repository and a polling architecture. The software installs on a dedicated server and communicates with existing third-party software agents distributed throughout the infrastructure. ProactiveNet also offers its own agents to be installed if there are no agents on the servers to be monitored. The agents process no data and sit dormant until ProactiveNet software requests performance data.

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