News

Symphoniq Unveils SOA App Monitoring Solution

• By Kurt Mackie
• February 19, 2008

Symphoniq Corp. today launched TrueView for SOA, a product enhancement to its flagship Web application monitoring solution. The product is designed to monitor application performance from the end user's perspective, in this case, users of Web services. It then drills down through the various architectural tiers to locate performance bottlenecks.

The solution supports J2EE and .NET architectures, as well as SOAP-based Web services. TrueView for SOA is not so much of a new product as additional monitoring capability in Symphoniq's main platform. It was designed for those moving toward SOA infrastructure or utilizing Web services.

Symphoniq uses a "dynamic injection" technique that adds JavaScript to Web-based applications to accomplish end-user performance monitoring. It's something that can be used with multiple technologies, including SOA and rich Internet applications.

"SOA applications leverage all of the same technologies and infrastructure that Web applications do," explained Ed Colonna, Symphoniq's vice president of marketing. "We started talking about AJAX and Flash and those things. As they work their way into the SOA application stack, it becomes even more integral to have one tool that can support all of those technologies and give you that single point of truth."

SOA typically adds greater complexity as Web services are added into composite applications. Tools exist that can help discover the functions and features of Web services, but they don't tell you about performance, according to Hon Wong, Symphoniq's CEO.

"When you orchestrate various Web services that you don't know about together to form your application, you don't know who created those," Wong said. "You don't know what kinds of tests they performed on those Web services. Certainly, in a composite application or mashup area, you can have Web services provided by third parties [e.g., Saleforce.com, Google Maps]. When you are confederating all of these different Web services, you don't really know what the performance profile [will be]."

Wong explained that Symphoniq's solution measures end user experience based on page response time and object response time. The solution can also drill down further, examining the servers responsible for the particular objects within the page. It can check the methods used to deliver the objects all of the way down to the database query level.

The TrueView for SOA application monitoring solution is currently available as part of the Symphoniq platform.