RealiTea

TeaLeaf Technology, a pioneer in user-based transaction monitoring,offers a new twist on Web application monitoring and debugging.   The RealiTea platform takes the stance that what the user sees is the most important consideration.  User session data is collected in a passive manner via a capture appliance attached to the spanning port of a switch or load balancer.  Not having to install collection agents on origin Web servers reduces the chance for any performance and stability impact, and actually makes the system easier to deploy in large-scale environments. 

TeaLeaf Technology, a pioneer in user-based transaction monitoring,offers a new twist on Web application monitoring and debugging. 

The RealiTea platform takes the stance that what the user sees is the most important consideration.  User session data is collected in a passive manner via a capture appliance attached to the spanning port of a switch or load balancer.  Not having to install collection agents on origin Web servers reduces the chance for any performance and stability impact, and actually makes the system easier to deploy in large-scale environments. 

The packet capture and reassembly of user sessions completed by RealiTea is more complex than simply monitoring HTTP sessions directly on a server.  But that complexity provides the ability to get timing information regarding end-user performance by looking at TCP acknowledgments.  This capability is quite valuable when you are trying to determine exactly what the end user experienced.

After initial data capture, information is fed to a Windows 2000/2003 box running the RealiTea server software.  During this stage, TeaLeaf wisely allows for filters to run against collected data, since not all data may actually be useful for customer support, monitoring, or debugging purposes.  RealiTea can provide near real-time observation of site health and activity, as captured data is initially aggregated and analyzed in a short-term memory database before it is moved to more long-term storage.

As data is collected, a Web browser can access a portal on a locally deployed RealiTea server to perform queries and monitor activity. The maturity of the platform is very evident in the ease with which data can be easily searched and navigated.  Drilling down into graphs, search results and alerts to a particular session, and then starting a session replay in the RealiTea Viewer is extremely natural.

The RealiTea Viewer session playback engine is very refined and clearly highlights user data entry and activity.

The RealiTea platform can also track system data, for example by collecting log data from servers.  It also can capture application level events thru API calls that are inserted directly into Web application code. 

For the full report, go to https://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2004/080204tealeaf.html