In-Depth
AdventNet pursues more manageable Java
- By Peter Bochner
- December 31, 2002
Too often, developers lack the time to build management functionality into
applications being rushed into production. It is a costly omission: Problems
found in QA and testing, not to mention development, are easier to diagnose and
repair than those found in production. Furthermore, developers freed from
tracing and debugging faults can spend more time developing applications.
Java Management Extensions (JMX) are gaining attention from development teams
seeking to add more manageability to Java-based application servers. By using
familiar Java semantics, JMX offloads much of the burden application developers
have in trying to understand the minutia of management technology. JMX
implements a form of SNMP agent familiar to longtime network system
managers.
Now AdventNet Inc., a Pleasanton, Calif., provider of J2EE management
solutions, is seeking to further the JMX cause by introducing a software
framework that allows developers to better customize the management of their
apps.
''Most developers don't want to deal with instrumentation until after the
application has been deployed,'' said Giri Giridharan, vice president of product
marketing at AdventNet. ''A developer would rather spend time developing
applications than reading about manageability. We're doing the heavy lifting for
them.''
In the past, the process of exposing the application attributes, such as
response time or the functions to be managed, required time, effort and
knowledge. ManageEngine Suite 5 allows developers to graphically pick attributes
to monitor and measure, creating rules that set off alerts that mark kinks in
the system. These attributes are represented as EJB components.
''For the 80% of the cases where developers need to expose management of their
application, our tool generates the SNMP needed to manage the application,'' said
Tony Thomas, CTO at AdventNet. ''They just point on the screen at what needs to
be exposed. Our philosophy is that management is only as good as the information
exposed.''
According to Thomas, leading management software vendors, like BMC, address
the problem of infrastructure management by giving customers a console. But such
products are said to provide limited visibility into the application itself.
''These tools provide a good solution for managing the application server, but
not for managing the application built on top of the server because a lot of the
management you need is particular to your app.''
According to the firm's Giridharan, the big challenge for AdventNet is
getting developers who have come to view management as a difficult task to take
a second look and see how much easier things have become.
Pricing for ManageEngine Suite 5 is on a per-server basis; the
instrumentation development tool costs about $1,000 per server, said
Giridharan.
See the related story, ''Manage Java apps for premium
performance,'' by Peter
Bochner.