Ganymede stretches technology and organizational boundaries with Pegasus 2.2

This is an area that deserves attention because it's at the forefront of a new science. We're not talking of just application, network or systems performance management, but rather of infrastructure performance (and availability) management, and the creation of a new kind of operations center.

This first line of control looks at networked resources as a mutually informing continuum. From this first line of control, specialists - whether they're Cisco configuration techies or database application developers - can be dispatched to solution-specific problems that require individualized attention. Such a mutually informing continuum will also support a new breed of capacity planners and IT designers.

One of the more compelling stories in this emerging marketplace is Ganymede's growth towards more comprehensive management for networked applications. As Ganymede grew from Chariot (for testing applications across the network) to Pegasus (for monitoring), and then from Pegasus Network Monitor to Pegasus Application Monitor, it built from a firm foundation with logical product extensions. With last week's announcement of Pegasus 2.2, Ganymede is enabling a flexible mixture of monitoring application performance between synthetic transactions (Pegasus Network Monitor) and observed (Pegasus Application Monitor).

Ganymede's synthetic transactions allow network administrators to assess how the network is performing to enable application delivery. Ganymede offers a library of application scripts that can emulate the network flow of specific applications, it also offers an application scanner through which administrators can add applications that aren't in the library. The synthetic transactions are proactively enabled, typically set for defined intervals, and are therefore more useful than observed transactions for solving problems before they impact users.

Pegasus Application Monitor passively observes application transactions at the desktop. This offers a better barometer for gauging the end-user experience, and complements Network Monitor for troubleshooting and prioritizing problem resolution.

Ganymede's flexibility in providing both types of solutions is partly enabled by its agent technology, Performance Endpoints. Performance Endpoints can reside on server and desktop components, and are distributed by a number of existing software solutions, including SMS and Tivoli. Performance Endpoints not only support Windows and Unix, but also MVS. Partly because of the background of its developers, Ganymede is unique in its support of Advanced Peer-to-Peer Networking.

One interesting deployment of Pegasus has involved a newly created organization, one that doesn't carry precisely the banner of "Infrastructure Operations Center." The actual name is "Systems Performance and Capacity Group" (SPCG), but it could have passed for close to the same idea. It was created two years ago as an experiment - largely out of the network management area - and has been a real success.

Ganymede products aren't alone at the SPCG. Hewlett-Packard's OpenView, MeasureWare, NetScout and Cisco's NetFlow, for instance, are all part of the mix. Moreover, the "Systems Performance and Capacity Group" is fortunate enough to reside at the SAS Institute, where an IT Service Vision product leverages SAS expertise in data warehousing to correlate across the various performance inputs. Not every user today can expect to be so fortunate. Not yet, at least. But that's another important area for product growth.