OpTier this week released an updated version of its flagship software that now provides more insight into business transactions as they work to fulfill user requests.

CoreFirst 3.0, software that manages application performance by monitoring transactions, is now able to track transactions as they occur to prevent any failures from impacting the overall application and business service. Dubbed "in-flight transaction monitoring," this capability enables IT managers to take corrective measures before a faulty transaction terminates and causes an application to miss performance thresholds associated service-level agreements.

"CoreFirst can show the progress of transactions and indicate via alerts that IT managers could be facing potential failures," says Motti Tal, executive vice president of marketing, product and business development at OpTier.

CoreFirst requires IT managers to install a central data repository on a dedicated server and to distribute agents on managed Web, database and application servers. IT managers must set the policies they want the software to use via a Web-based interface, which also serves as a management interface and reporting tool. Once deployed, CoreFirst discovers how applications traverse the network and use the managed devices, and the agents monitor the transaction workloads on the servers.

OpTier also improved user experience monitoring in CoreFirst 3.0, Tal says. The software can now display for IT managers transaction errors alongside successful completed transactions to help them better understand the performance users or customers experienced. And the software is able to take multiple symptoms and draw conclusions on impending performance problems.

For instance, CoreFirst will learn that five events happening during a certain timeframe indicates that a chatty application is hogging resources and slowing down performance, Tal explains.

"These are performance issues that cause something to break immediately, but chatty applications are a danger to the health of the overall system and need to be identified so they can be fixed," Tal says.

Pricing for CoreFirst 3.0 starts at between $3,000 and $10,000 per CPU depending on platform.