News

Tool promises to shed light onto legacy 'black hole'

• By Rich Seeley
• February 12, 2003

Neon Systems Inc., Sugar Land, Texas, last week unveiled a monitoring/management tool designed to shed light onto the ''black hole'' of legacy mainframe processing connected to distributed applications based on J2EE and .NET platforms.

The new Shadow Console is a Windows-based tool that allows developers and system administrators to get chronological error messages and performance metrics from the mainframe portion of a distributed application, said Chris Garner, Neon vice president of research and development. He said the new tool was developed based on input from customers using the company's Shadow technology for legacy mainframe integration.

''A number of our users are deploying WebSphere and WebLogic applications,'' Garner said. ''And a lot of them have had end-to-end monitoring requirements that have not been able to be fulfilled because they had this black hole.''

He said developers and system administrators were able to see what was happening while the application was running in the J2EE environment. But when it made a call to a legacy system, such as an old IBM OS/390, they could not monitor what errors or performance issues the application might be encountering.

With the Console tool running on a developer's Windows PC, Garner said, 'They can identify potential failure points or areas that need to be optimized.'

For systems administrators and managers, the new Neon tool integrates via SNMP with network management systems from vendors such as Tivoli Systems Inc. and the HP OpenView division, said Jeff Overton, director, product management for Shadow systems. Shadow Console automatically forwards alerts to the management systems, he added.

Neon's Shadow technology operates on J2EE and .NET platforms to provide full J2CA, JDBC or ODBC access to mainframe data sources and transaction environments, said Overton. It supports legacy technologies, including DB2, CICS/TS, IMS/TM, IMS/DB, VSAM, ADABAS, Natural/ACI, flat files and IDMS running on IBM z/OS mainframes, he added.

Further information is available at http://www.neonsys.com/solutions/shadow/shadow_console.asp