FineGround fine-tunes app performance monitoring

Web acceleration companies have been looking at application acceleration as more businesses put their enterprise applications online. The need to boost performance is undoubtedly important. So too, is the need to monitor how applications are performing.

FineGround Networks, which sells its Condenser software to make sure applications run their best, is introducing software aimed at enabling users to see exactly how well applications are running. The product will address not just how applications are delivered, but also how they are actually performing on end user desktops.

“The challenge was that while there are a number of products in the marketplace today that do application performance monitoring, none of them provide visibility for the IT folks into what does the end user actually see,” FineGround CEO Nat Kausik says.

Most of the application monitoring products today require agents to be installed in remote locations to periodically test application performance, Kausik says.

“What IT wants in the monitoring space is no agents, they want to monitor live users carrying out live transactions and they want low complexity… It should be simple to use and simple to maintain,” he says. “Keeping those goals in mind, we’re introducing this product called AppScope.”

AppScope can be installed on Unix boxes running Linux, Solaris or AIX. It plugs into a load balancer that sits behind the firewall and in front of application servers. The software combines a database, a management-and-reporting console and the software to monitor end user performance. There is no need to deploy agents in any locations, Kausik says.

With AppScope, IT managers can track end-user response times and analyze results based on types of delay (bandwidth problems vs. server performance, for example), time periods and locations.

AppScope, which is priced at $20,000 per installation, can work independently or in conjunction with FineGround’s Condenser application acceleration software. It is available now.