In our fall release we’re introducing a new capability in the INETCO Insight application performance monitoring (APM) solution that is so powerful, we want all our customers and partners to have some time to digest it and plan how they want to use it.
INETCO Insight captures, decodes, correlates and presents an extraordinary amount of rich transaction data. The primary intent of this activity, until now, was so IT operations managers could quickly and easily identify / isolate application performance problems.
Many of you have commented on how unique and interesting the data we present is. How unusual it is to find “technical” performance data (like response times) correlated with “business” data (like conversion rates and dollar amounts). How hard it would be to get this mixture of data out of systems of record at the fidelity we deliver it. And how powerful and useful it could be if you could leverage these analytics outside of INETCO Insight.
As we looked out at the market, we saw that most other Application Performance Monitoring software systems were designed as walled gardens. The very best and most interesting data was locked up, only available within the product and exposed through a limited range of analytic capabilities each vendor could imagine, implement, and charge extra for. Many leave you hanging when it comes to correlating business outcomes to the performance of critical applications. And most didn’t have even half the interesting data INETCO Insight did.
That looked like an opportunity to us…
Universal Forwarding is a new feature coming in the fall release of INETCO Insight that makes it easy for you to do whatever you want to do with the rich data INETCO Insight collects on every transaction and consumer interaction. It is also key to availability and performance monitoring within complex application and IT systems architectures.
Any 3rd party application can subscribe to any of the rich transaction AND performance information provided by INETCO Insight. This information includes:
- Alerts: performance anomalies that are auto-detected by INETCO Insight or specific events configured by users.
- Real-time statistics: second-by-second metrics on application performance, including transaction arrival rates, response times, rates by different statuses, network delay, application delay, etc.
- Complete transaction records: Every field and detail from headers AND the application payload for EVERY individual transaction, including user-defined fields configured by INETCO Insight administrators. Available for each layer of our Unified Transaction Model
- Interval statistics: Aggregated data available at ten minute intervals based on calculations configured by users (e.g. sum of fee income on withdrawal transactions, count of transactions > 30 seconds in duration)
All of this information will be made available in easy-to-use CSV and XML formats that can be sent directly into log analyzers, event management systems, enterprise applications, IT operations analytics platforms and other business analytics software.
Here are just a few of the use cases Universal Forwarding enables:
- Feed application performance events to your central event management system to simplify your monitoring environment and speed up root cause discovery
- Feed an executive dashboard with real-time metrics on conversion rates, purchase amounts, SLA misses, etc. for performance problem impact assessment
- Get 1-second granularity detail on response times, arrival rates, and concurrency for capacity planning purposes, without turning on performance-sapping measurement code in your core application
- Intercept fraudulent transactions in real-time and anticipate incidents before they complete by piping transaction requests into a fraud monitoring system
- Stream real-time browsing and purchasing data into analytics and forecasting applications
- Send detailed records of failed transactions to your log analysis software so you can cross-correlate application performance problems with underlying infrastructure events
- Search for transactions that happened weeks or months ago
- Forward transaction analytics to a central IT Operations Analytics Platform to help IT teams quickly make sense of exploding volumes and variety of data
We snuck the initial framework behind this feature in INETCO Insight 5.3.1 and threw one of our developers at the task of building a few packaged integrations to 3rd party applications. Within two weeks he had connectors ready for IBM Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus, HP Operations Manager, NCR APTRA Vision, and Splunk. These were included in the INETCO Insight 5.3.1 release. Try them out!
We’ll continue to build on these packaged forwarding capabilities and add others over time (suggestions welcome). But the real power of Universal Forwarding is that it makes it easy for you to do whatever you want to do with the rich data INETCO Insight collects on every transaction and consumer interaction.
We’d love to hear your ideas and if you’re interested in learning more about INETCO Insight and Universal Forwarding, please let us know. You can contact me at