BlueStripe Provides Insight Into Why Apps Fail

Tools that tell us we have an application performance problem are a dime a dozen, says Glenn O'Donnell, senior analyst, Forrester Research, but "those that tell us 'why' have proven elusive." We desperately need the tools to do more for us to answer the "why?" questions, he says. "Complexity is exploding, and even the brightest humans are losing grip with this complexity. We need innovative algorithms to sift through all of this complexity to give us the insight we can’t otherwise attain."

Based in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park, BlueStripe Software wants to address that gap with the new release of its automated application management and transaction monitoring product, FactFinder. With version 5.5, the company has enhanced the transaction-tracking analytics to more effectively map out the multiple tiers of an application, says O'Donnell. "This is a very difficult thing to do, and a few companies, including BlueStripe, are finally showing some promise to give us insight to this chain of application links." There remains much more innovation ahead in this game, but we like the steps BlueStripe has taken toward this objective, he adds.

FactFinder automatically follows transactions in real-time, wherever they go--across tiers, across platforms and across architectures--even into virtual machines, private cloud and third-party services. The company says this visibility into all the interconnections and dependencies--combined with monitoring and mapping, root cause analysis, benchmarking, forecasting and planning--enables IT operations teams to more effectively manage application and transaction availability.

The new transaction monitoring and performance management capabilities in version 5.5 include Transaction Service Level Monitoring Dashboards that show the performance and availability status of specific transactions, Cross Machine Transaction Views that provide hop-by-hop transaction performance across the entire infrastructure and Transaction Explorer Problem Solving Workbench, which isolates and maps individual transaction systems across the infrastructure so that users can follow performance problems across the transaction for root cause analysis.

BlueStripe Chief Operating Officer Vic Nyman says that by monitoring transaction performance hop-by-hop, FactFinder delivers complete awareness of availability and performance for all applications and transactions. "End-to-end visibility has been sought for for years," he says. "Our approach is instantaneous--7 seconds--when changes happen."

In addition to reducing the mean time to resolution for critical incidents by up to 90%, FactFinder reduces the number of operations people required to constantly monitor an IT environment. "What used to take as many as 10 people from different silos to sort out can now be handled by one person," says Nyman.

BlueStripe has always been different than most of its competition, saysForrester's O’Donnell. “While this may be a dot release, it does appear to be a more significant step forward than a dot release would imply."

Transaction-based analytics are innovative, though not totally unique, but we do see BlueStripe’s approach as being a unique step forward, he adds.

"The way they combine transaction monitoring, server-side insight, application mapping and a little intellectual 'magic' is very innovative. The magic is the algorithms that bring this all together. It’s magic because it is the stuff that can be hidden under the covers and left proprietary. This is always good for vendors because it makes their technology harder to emulate, thus giving them more long-lasting competitive advantage."

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