Per a survey conducted by EMA on monitoring and managing an application, it was found that 54% of application related problems are notified by end users to the support personnel. Obviously, managing a customer facing application in this fashion is not efficient. However, this is a well known and perennial problem because the tools available in the market don’t really help isolate the problem in an easy fashion thereby increasing the incident (problem) isolation/resolution time.

Consider the following enterprise application environment depicted in the figure below. How do you isolate which tier or component in the application is causing the problem when an issue is notified by a customer? Finding a resolution can happen only when the problem causing component/code has been identified precisely. Application Performance Management (APM) tools (i.e. deep dive tools) such as Introscope are pretty well known to pinpoint the root cause of an issue in an application. While such tools are great assets to service management teams, however, implementing deep dive solution for every tier in an enterprise is not feasible from cost/benefit ratio perspective and besides there are limitations related to process and (some political, which is another posting) that limit departments from using one tool as a standard for application management across tiers.

Business Transaction Monitoring (BTM) tools can help in reducing the incident isolation time for a faster service restoration and faster resolution in combination with deep dive tools. BTM tools have the ability to monitor business transactions across tiers or application silos and provide comprehensive visibility into an application on a single pane.

Correlsense Sharepath is a BTM solution that attempts to make the process of incident and problem management simple, efficient and reducing the time in problem isolation. Oren Elias, the CEO of Correlsense mentions BTM is about monitoring across tiers with probably less deep dive than the APM tools that are good in managing single tiers.

From my conversations with Correlsense team in learning about their product, Sharepath arguably supports the largest application technology stacks (i.e. PHP, JEE, .Net among others) in the BTM market. Support for ERP such as SAP is planned for this year. The value add by providing support for a large variety of application technology stack or packaged software is to reduce the overall problem identification and resolution time thereby reducing the cost and business impact associated with an incident.

Correlsense Sharepath uses a distributed architecture for data collection and reporting. Low overhead agents are deployed on the servers to be monitored. The agents collect the transaction related data and this data is stored in a repository for a later reporting and analysis. Some of the salient features of Correlsense Sharepath that would interest an enterprise are as follows:

1. Minimal time for configuration and deployment of agents with the least overhead on the application.

2. Support for transaction monitoring (includes virtualized environments) across all major application protocols such as HTTP, LDAP etc. (RMI support is currently available).

3. Provides a capability to define rules for displaying the monitored transactions in a bubble chart. The bubble chart is a straight out of box feature and is comprehensive in displaying the transactions performance against the Service Level Agreement (SLA).The SLA is base lined from a historical measurement of transactions such as averages or standard deviations. API support is available for integration with repositories having the SLA information.

4. Supports integration with alerting solutions such as Tivoli, HP OVO and CA Unicenter.

5. Works in conjunction with deep dive tools such as Introscope in finding a problem’s root cause.

HP Transaction viewer and Optier are competitors to Sharepath. However the Correlsense team believes that the easy setup without the involvement of professional services with a simple innovative interface providing a complete transaction view of an enterprise system is an advantage over its competitors.