Application Monitoring

Oracle OpenWorld is big … so big that, as a visitor, it’s real easy to get completely overwhelmed. After a while, all the vendors sound so much alike that it becomes impossible to remember who solves this problem or that problem, or if there was even a problem in the first place.

This poses a challenge for a software vendor like SL. We don’t want you walking away confused about what we do and mixing us up with some other similar-sounding software supplier. We want you to know exactly what we do, how we do it and why we are the best at it.

The SL RTView suite of monitoring products can do many things … but at OpenWorld 2013, we highlighted one particular area in which RTView shines above all the rest.

In a nutshell … how to provide complete operational visibility into the health state of complex, custom-built, mission-critical applications and services that run on top of some combination of WebLogic application servers, Coherence distributed caching, WebLogic or TIBCO JMS messaging, and VMWare or Amazon virtualized infrastructure.

A big nutshell, yes … but actually quite simple and easy to comprehend.

A company like Oracle would love it if their customers built applications using ONLY the Oracle stack. But we all know it doesn’t work out that way. Real applications are cobbled together from lots of different components from many different vendors.

This happens for a variety of reasons. Sometimes the customer is looking for the best-of-breed for each component type. Other times they are forced to integrate multiple, large, entrenched systems after a merger or acquisition. The end result in either case is a complex heterogeneous application that cannot be monitored in a complete, effective fashion using any of the tools supplied by a single component vendor.

It is not easy to solve this problem: how to efficiently collect data from all these technologies, organize the data you’ve collected into bundles relevant to specific subsystems within the larger application, determine what is normal based on historical trends and alert on abnormalities, and make the resulting health state reports visible to many different types of stake holders in the organization.

You could do this by parsing tons of log files … but you will have to spend bucketloads of cash to provide the hardware needed to do it. See my Blog Post about Log Files.

You might try to use any one of the current crop of Application Performance Monitoring tools that requires you to instrument every JVM with an agent … but this introduces latency in order to monitor it and charges you for every agent on every JVM.

The RTView suite of products has evolved over the years to provide the highly efficient, agentless collection of data that is required to deploy a non-intrusive monitoring solution in this type of heterogeneous middleware and infrastructure environment. The historical and alert management capabilities are unmatched in their flexibility and richness of functionality. Performance and scalability of the solution are paramount and unsurpassed.

RTView was the first product to provide deep monitoring for Oracle Coherence and offers rich cluster-based application-centric views of WebLogic based applications. The depth of monitoring that RTView provides around TIBCO middleware is well known. With so many companies moving their application deployments to virtual VMware data centers, RTView is the only solution that can provide all the pieces of the monitoring puzzle needed to keep these complex custom applications running smoothly.

PS: For additional information, visit my post about RTView and Oracle Enterprise Manager