INETCO Insider

Newest Video from “Loki’s Cryptex: Unlocking Transaction Complexity”:

Introducing the Unified Transaction Model – assembling performance data into actionable information

The "unified transaction model" (UTM) is a process developed by INETCO to organize and display multi-dimensional data such as network, application and service level performance metrics, in an intuitive way. The UTM makes it easy to analyze transaction performance in the context of end-user experience, multiple application components and infrastructures involving modern complexities such as software-as-a-service, virtual servers or cloud-based applications. Watch the video to learn more! (4:09 mins)

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Other Recommended Videos from Loki’s Cryptex:

• What Does BTM Look Like? (3:15 min)
• Understanding AMQP 1.0 (3:02 min)
• Agent vs Agentless: The Application Performance and Transaction Monitoring Debate (3:20 min)

Agentless by Design

By Loki Jorgenson, Chief Scientist at INETCO. This article has been posted on the INETCO blog.

“Agents versus Agentless” is a very old debate within IT circles. Like many persistent arguments, any given version of it usually ends with "it depends". It is a pros-and-cons weighing exercise that rests heavily on a number of circumstances.

For those not familiar with the debate, it comes down to one defining question: Do you trust whoever built the agent enough to install it and let it run on your critical infrastructure?

Agent-based monitoring systems require you to install some software onto the device of interest - or compile it into the code of your precious applications. That often puts IT and application managers on edge:

• What if it breaks the server?
• Can you be sure it does not have a memory leak?
• Does it use a lot of the local CPU for its own processing?
• Is it secure? Does it use encrypted communications?
• Do we have to put one on every server?
• How do I choose which servers to put it on?
• How often do patches come out?
• Do they work in virtualized environments as well?
• Will this one conflict with the five other agents I had to install on this server?

Once agents are installed, they can provide an incredible amount of information about the inner workings of a system or device. It is like turning the lights on an otherwise black box. But the view tends to be limited to the local device where it is installed. And the risk, if not the impact, of the installation can make you hesitate.

Agentless approaches, on the other hand, have been attractive if only for avoiding all this teeth-gnashing. Agentless monitoring does not require software to be installed on your systems - usually it relies on some existing agent or interface that is part of a device, such as a native service or daemon - or it consumes some “opportunistic” source of data, such as a syslog file. These data sources are usually available or being generated, regardless of monitoring, and can be accessed without major modifications to the critical infrastructure.

One thing to determine, when considering an opportunistic source of data, is just how rich the information is. It is true these sources are rarely as rich as an agent-based source…But there are notable exceptions. When the opportunistic data source is network traffic, there are a great number of advantages worth noting:

• always on - no additional configuration of the servers required
• a very rich source of data
• carries at least two levels of information - network and application
• easily accessible (e.g. through the SPAN port of a switch)
• data access independent of critical infrastructure
• views across most or all participating devices (depending on network topology)

This is why, when weighing agents versus agentless for business transaction management, favor tilts heavily toward agentless. Agentless for business transaction management (BTM) refers to the solutions that use network traffic as their opportunistic data source. Granular transaction data can be gathered without affecting the capacity or performance of critical applications – a feat that can only be achieved with an agentless transaction management solution.

Most of the usual benefits of agents are available to the agentless BTM approach, such as secured communications, automatic updating of monitoring software, and intelligent local processing that optimizes monitoring. The advantages of agentless for BTM become even stronger when you consider monitoring multiple applications, third party services, and virtual or Cloud-based network infrastructure components. Agents do not provide information on the interoperability of multiple service applications. Agents are also hard to place on 3rd party, virtual or Cloud-based systems. The scalability and elasticity of a monitoring system has to match the environments it is monitoring. Otherwise, it rapidly loses value and upkeep effort increases dramatically.

For a deeper understanding of Agent versus Agentless, download INETCO’s latest whitepaper:

Agents vs Agentless: Extending the Debate from Application Performance Management (APM) to Business Transaction Management (BTM) Solutions

Or watch this Agent vs Agentless video extracted from “Loki’s Cryptex: Unlocking the Secrets of Transaction Complexity”:

How BTM Became One of Telecom New Zealand’s Best Payback Projects for 2010

What Should BTM Look Like?

By Nicole Arksey, Manager of the UI and Web Application Group for INETCO Insight Business Transaction Management (BTM) Software

We all know that monitoring business transactions and application performance can be a painful experience if the tools used don't allow the flexibility to view the data you need to see, in a format that makes it possible to:

• quickly access the intelligence you need,
• make timely decisions, and
• take immediate action.

After spending the past six months studying our customer’s workflows, the INETCO® R&D team is set to deliver some pretty slick ways that will enable our users to move more intuitively and quickly between monitoring live dashboards, exploring historical trends and drilling into the transaction level details they need to do their jobs.

In the upcoming release of INETCO Insight 5, scheduled for Q1 – 2012, we have improved the way users are able to build up their own dashboards to view their data in real-time. Users will have the ability to view data sliced and diced in many different ways, including real-time speedometers, pie charts, histograms, bar charts and line charts.

We have also added a configurable health check widget, where users can quickly see how well their networks are running based on the personalized metrics that are important to them.

Along with new views, INETCO Insight 5 will have a new and improved workflow between real-time views, transaction details and historical data. This means that from any real-time chart, users can instantly retrieve the transaction details making up this chart, or open an eight-day historical view of the data displayed in the chart. Instantaneous viewing of transactional data allows users to get to the details they need and better understand what is happening on their networks, while viewing the historical data allows users to gain a better understanding of how their networks have been performing over a longer period of time. Once in the historical and transaction view, users have the flexibility of adding new metrics, filtering data and changing time periods to better get to the source of their network issues.

By ensuring visibility into your business transactions, the next product release of INETCO Insight will make understanding your application performance easier than ever before!

If you are interested in a sneak preview, watch this YouTube Video extracted from “Loki’s Cryptex: Unlocking Transaction Complexity”:

Whitepapers

INETCO has recently published two new whitepapers:

VIEW all published INETCO Whitepapers

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Webinars

AMQP 1.0 – Changing the Future of Mainstream Business Messaging (September 2011)

Join INETCO, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Microsoft Corporation as they explain the growing momentum behind AMQP, and answer questions such as:

• How is AMQP 1.0 transforming the way business is done in the Cloud and over the Internet?
• Is AMQP 1.0 meant to replace existing mainstream messaging and integration technologies such as Java (JMS) and .NET (WCF)?
• How is AMQP 1.0 different than previous versions of the AMQP protocol?

Learning about AMQP - A Critical Business Messaging Initiative (July 2011)

Listen to AMQP industry consortium members and analysts from Bank of America, VMware, Red Hat, and the 451 Group as they answer your questions and share their thoughts on:

• The potential market impact of AMQP, and why it is superior to previous middleware integrations
• Why it has become a surprise front-runner for passing data within cloud & high mobility infrastructures
• Real business cases validating the use of AMQP

VIEW all recorded INETCO webinars

What’s NEWs?

               

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Hello world, and welcome to the INETCO blog on all things BTM!

In July 2011, INETCO launched their blog. Thanks to all for your feedback, and making us think we actually have something interesting to say. Most popular posts for Q3 were:

• How Customers ATM Uses Business Transaction Management
• Just Enough Transaction Monitoring
• Complexity, Thy Name is Multi-hop

SIGN UP here, and receive INETCO’s weekly blog and breaking news postings.

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INETCO Positioned in the Challenger Quadrant of Gartner Inc.’s Application Performance Monitoring Magic Quadrant

INETCO® Systems Ltd., a leading provider of transaction monitoring solutions for complex business transaction environments, has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the challenger’s quadrant of the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Magic Quadrant released on September 19th, 2011. Evaluation was based on completeness of vision and ability to execute.

“In the past nine months, INETCO has successfully executed on a number of strategic initiatives that helped us expand into new market verticals and secure recognition within the challenger quadrant,” says Bijan Sanii, CEO of INETCO. “These include an impending partnership with one of the world’s largest software, services, and hardware companies; being first-to-market with a monitoring solution that makes it easy to adopt the open sourced AMQP 1.0 business messaging protocol for everything from infrastructure services to cloud computing; and the planned January 2012 release of INETCO Insight® 5.2, a robust, light-weight transaction monitoring product that will change the face of the APM industry.”

Gartner estimates that, in 2011, approximately $2 billion will be spent globally on APM licenses and first-year maintenance contracts. This represents a 15% increase, compared with the $1.7 billion spent on this technology in 2010, which, in turn, grew by about 10% over the global spend in 2009.

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October 12th AMQP Conference and AMQP 1.0 Launch Event - Only 2 Weeks Left to Register!

Join representatives from JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft Corporation, Red Hat, VMware, Storm MQ, and INETCO.

Date: Wednesday, October 12th, 2011

Breakfast & registration opens at 8:30am. Conference kick-off is at 9:00am.

Location: JPMorgan Chase & Co. Headquarters — 270 Park Avenue, New York

VIEW FULL AGENDA

It is free to attend, but spots are filling up quickly - REGISTER Now!