Precise 9.0 set to track transactions in the cloud

Precise Software has updated its application monitoring tools to cover virtual infrastructure, allowing companies to track every transaction in real time, even if they are running on virtual machines in the cloud.

Precise 9.0 manages virtual and physical application performance all the way down to the storage level, according to the firm, providing a new level of visibility over transactions in on-premise and cloud-based systems.

Alf Saggese, European managing director of Precise, said that the new user interface allowed for "pretty close to" real-time updates on transactions.

"In previous releases, updates were in 15-minute slices. Now we update every 30 seconds," he said.

The ability to keep track of workloads on-premise, in the cloud or a hybrid of both is a key capability that customers have been asking for, Saggese said, as this has been a stumbling block to greater take-up of cloud computing.

Ensuring quality-of-service levels can be tricky in virtualised and cloud environments because of possible contention for resources as virtual machines are spun up automatically as demand dictates.

"Now we are able to provide organisations almost with an insurance policy before they move business-critical workloads to the cloud, as we can deliver transparency of a transaction's journey to the cloud," he said.

Because of this end-to-end tracking capability, Precise 9.0 is able to identify the root cause behind almost all performance issues, according to the firm, automatically finding the cause of application transaction problems in Java code, database or storage.

"Diagnostics often gets overlooked, but we can rapidly find the cause if an application is having performance issues. There are lots of competitive products that have wonderful dashboards, but this ability to drill deep down is massive," said Saggese.

Precise 9.0 is available now, but the firm has been operating it for some time in beta with selected customers.

It supports most enterprise versions of Unix, Linux and Windows, but has cloud support only for VMware at present. Applications covered by transaction monitoring include J2EE and .Net, SAP and PeopleSoft.

The company said that it is looking at licensing issues around monitoring agents running on virtual machines, and is also considering offering Precise 9.0 on a monthly rental price tariff.