Here’s our October FAQ of the Month: What do Oracle, Microsoft, BMC and INETCO have in common?
We’re all in the Challenger’s Quadrant in Gartner Inc.’s Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) published September 19th 2011.
As Gartner’s rules stipulate, I will not make any reference to our position with respect to them. I will make the entirely factual observation that if you’re reading the document from left to right, you’ll come across our name last (and that’s a good thing!).
You can get INETCO’s biased opinion on why we were able to make a more significant year-to-year jump than any other vendor in the quadrant here.
Seriously, one of the most interesting parts of the report to me is the description of a growing relationship between application dependency mapping (the second dimension in Gartner’s 5 dimensional APM model) and user-defined transaction profiling (the third dimension):
“…APM vendors, which have service-dependency mapping capabilities and user-defined transaction-profiling capabilities in their portfolios, have begun to supplement their dependency-mapping system models with snapshots of the transaction paths generated by their user-defined transaction-profiling functionality. The idea behind this hybrid approach is straightforward. The transaction path will reveal many aspects of the logical structure of application as it manifests itself at runtime. At the same time, these transaction path snapshots provide a vague picture of the lower layers of infrastructure, physical or virtual. Together, the two technologies, it is argued, can provide the user with a genuinely comprehensive model — capturing the bottom infrastructure-centric aspects of an application model alongside the top- down, transaction-path-centric aspects.”
Both spaces have been dominated by older, heavy-weight technologies that seem to take constant care and feeding to do what the vendors promise. I can’t imagine trying to integrate the two into “a genuinely comprehensive model”. Perhaps that’s why they go on to say “…no major vendor provides any kind of deep integration between the two technologies. This means that the resulting comprehensive models resemble two independent topology maps sitting side-by-side with a few threads connecting them, rather than a single, coherent portrait of an application’s runtime architecture.”
But why this is really interesting to me is because INETCO Insight® DOES do this – it was architected to do this from the beginning. Yes – you can have it all in one product. Quoting again from the report, this time from the Strengths section on INETCO: “At the core of (INETCO) Insight lies a sophisticated, multilayered transaction model that makes it easy to infer runtime architecture structures from span port data.”
INETCO has recently given this unique “model” a name: We call it the Unified Transaction Model (UTM). The UTM exists for one sole purpose: Assembling performance data into actionable information.
As written up in last week’s newsletter that went out to the masses, the Unified Transaction Model 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.
So leave it to the new guys to get it and as is commonly the case, “challenge” the way things have been done by the major vendors to date. We think we are onto something, and hope you agree.
To learn more about INETCO’s Unified Transaction Model, check out this YouTube video:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9_QsgGO0bg [/youtube]
Be sure to check back for the UTM whitepaper to be released in November 2011….