Symantec has announced the release of Symantic i3 7.5, a new release and rebranding of VERITAS i3. i3 7.5 is a software package designed for performance problem identification, root cause analysis, and proactive management of J2EE platforms. It also extends support for the Sybase database environment.

Symantec i3 builds on the Symantec i3 foundation to provide the following additional capabilities:

• Extensive new Portal Server Management for IBM WebSphere Portal Server and BEA WebLogic Portal Server showing portlet performance over time, by invocation, and end user response time to identify performance issues quickly and reduce cost.
• A new Customizable Dashboard to control "who you want seeing what" for J2EE performance. This new interface provides selectable user-named views of J2EE performance data, to show only information germane to a specific business role and keep it there for easy viewing when customers logout and back in.
• New flexible user defined J2EE Instrumentation Modes and Memory Leak Detection to give customers the information they need to troubleshoot J2EE performance issues quickly and easily and at the same time protect against CPU overhead surges.

The Adaptive Instrumentation capability included in Symantec i3 software ensures that all of an application's "hot spots" are identified and instrumented automatically.

New OS support includes: Sun Solaris 10 and IBM AIX 5.3. New J2EE server support includes: IBM WebSphere 6.0, BEA WebLogic 9.0 and Apache Tomcat 5.5. New database and packaged application support includes: PeopleSoft 8.4.4 and 8.4.5, Sybase 12.5.3, and Oracle 10.1.0.4 and 9.2.0.7.

Pricing for components of Symantec i3 starts at USD $1,500.

I had a demo of this product 2 years ago, when it was a Veritas product. It was impressive. There was components to deploy on the J2EE app server, on the database server and on our back-end system (SAP system). These component were monitoring time responses on all these servers. It was able to analyse performance issue, and to point out the problem. For example, it was able to point out a time consuming SQL request or SAP component (called by JCA). It was rather expensive too.
I had a look on the new product. It seems that the product has changed a lot and looks more conventionnal. No more database or back-end system component?

Thanks for the info, Joseph. It is very important to educate businesses on this subject. There are many different methods for businesses to utilize. Here are some resources that are both helpful and beneficial to those who are looking for more information on performance management. Don Elkington wrote this informative article: http://www.speaking.com/articles_html/DonElkington_651.html Management-Resources.com offers these helpful tips on appraisals: http://www.management-resources.org/universal.php?c=10&a=34 In this article, Derek Stockley outlines the importance of communication in dealing with day to day performance problems and situations: http://derekstockley.com.au/newsletters-05/023-importance-communication.html Another helpful article, this one by Brian L. Joiner and Peter R. Scholtes, provided by Clemson University: http://deming.eng.clemson.edu/pub/den/files/tql.txt Halogen Software provides several informative White Papers on different subjects concerning performance management: http://www.halogensoftware.com/support/whitepapers.php I hope this information has been helpful to those who are looking into performance management.