News

Heroix pursues line-of-business performance views

• By Jack Vaughan
• June 10, 2004

In data centers and beyond, the view of performance is usually based around servers and server activity. Now, longtime performance management player Heroix Corp. is looking to offer another set of views, one it is calling Line of Business Views.

In the latest release (V.3) of the Heroix eQ Management Suite, the company lets users -- even end users -- group relevant application, server and infrastructure monitoring activities around specific business processes, said Chris Smith, senior engineer. This approach, he said, charts performance in terms of business events that can span numerous servers. Color-coded icons show which business activities are affected by performance or availability issues, making it easier to correlate and correct problems before they impact the business. Using dialog boxes, scenarios can be assembled without coding or scripting.

The problem with application performance management, as with so many things today, is having too much data. "You have to have tools that make sense of many different messages," said Smith.

"People do measures and then do Boolean thresholds, but they still have to sort it out," he noted. "We have a rules engine that allows you to correlate lots of different things and generate a message that is useful. You can embody the intelligence of [expert personnel] in the application."

The ability to customize app monitoring is key, said Rick Lane, president at Heroix. "We can't know your business as well as you do," he said, "but we can [create] a tool that lets you embed what you need."

The Heroix eQ Management Suite runs on AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Tru64, Linux, Windows Server, Open VMS and other OSes; it covers packaged and custom apps, DB systems, messaging platforms and other software.