Application Monitoring

Many SL customers have successfully deployed stand-alone RTView products, such as TIBCO EMS or BW Monitor, Oracle Coherence Monitor, or the RTView CORE Development Tools. We are often asked what additional value does RTView Enterprise Monitor provide to complement these stand-alone products?

We created a detailed white paper that describes five specific benefits in using RTView Enterprise Monitor to bring a global perspective to monitoring in your organization. You can find it here: Monitoring the TIBCO-Powered Enterprise. Each benefit is presented in the context of a common IT problem along with the mechanism by which RTView addresses that problem.

In the interest of brevity, the five key points are summarized below. If you read carefully, you will see that the benefits presented here go far beyond the traditional approach to “better troubleshooting, improved MTTR”. Instead, we address the true cause of operational bottlenecks and failures: poor communication between functional teams and inefficiencies inherent in accessing critical information in a timely fashion.

Consolidate Monitoring Data Across Technology Silos

In large organizations, distinct workgroups are responsible for infrastructure, middleware, or applications support — and typically do not share monitoring data with one another. RTView provides an architecture that consolidates data across these “silos”, giving each group control of its own data, yet making it available to others in the organization through a common interface. Communication and collaboration are improved, and problems prevented by sharing information about system anomalies before they become serious.

Correlate Key Metrics Across Disparate And Load-Balanced Components

Applications are often implemented across multiple load-balanced middleware components. Monitoring data must be painstakingly accessed from multiple servers or administrative tools, one at a time, in order to understand system behavior. RTView provides the framework to correlate and aggregate metrics across these components, providing immediate end-to-end visualization of data flows across technologies. This can give early warning of degradation, allowing users to take corrective action and avoid outages altogether.

Safely Expose Data From Critical Systems To More Users

During stressful outages, many users may attempt to access critical databases or administrative tools, and exacerbate the problem. RTView addresses this by acting as a buffer for important data, collecting the data only once, yet making the information available on demand to anyone who needs it to investigate problems. In many cases, data that might normally be restricted can be shared with users who can benefit from its availability.

Provide Application-Centric Navigation Through Data

So much monitoring data can be collected in large systems that it becomes simply overwhelming to wade through and determine what applications may be affected. RTView Enterprise Monitor organizes and presents component-level information in the context of the applications or services that are dependent on them. Monitoring data that are relevant and easy to digest are much more likely to be used in advance of an outage rather than afterwards.

Scale to Very Large Environments With High Performance

Large applications can produce huge volumes of monitoring data, making it impractical, costly, and slow to transmit to a central repository. RTView provides a highly distributed architecture for the collection, analysis, distribution and visualization system of such data. An RTView-based monitoring system can scale to very large, globally distributed environments.

In Summary

Technology workgroups or silos represent a form of organizational specialization and are not going away any time soon. Most of the benefits described above result from RTView Enterprise Monitor’s unique ability to facilitate improved communication between these independent groups and to take full advantage of that specialization. The architecture of RTView Enterprise Monitor supports these benefits in a highly scalable and usable fashion.

There are plenty of tools available to troubleshoot problems once they occur and costly professionals ready to tackle the job. But experience has shown that, for most organizations, the greatest return on investment comes from preventing problems in the first place. Improving communication between key workgroups is the “low hanging fruit” that RTView is able to help harvest.

More information about the benefits of RTView Enterprise Monitor can be found at SL Corporation’s website www.sl.com. For reference, the detailed white paper mentioned above can be found at Monitoring the TIBCO-Powered Enterprise.

More information about the complete solution provided by RTView Enterprise Monitor can be found at the links below.

Middleware Monitoring

End-to-End Application Monitoring

Additionally, the blogs listed below provide more detail about how RTView addresses the challenges inherent in dealing with large volumes of real-time monitoring data.

How Real-Time Do You Want To Be?”

Big Data – Not Just An Amorphous Blob

The CMDB Of The Future