Wily Technology has announced Introscope 6, their flagship management platform for Java EE apps. Wily traces and records transactions and performance metrics from the browser down through JVMs and into the DB, at the transaction instance level. v6 adds browser rountrip recording, tracking of HTTP errors, error replay, dashboard templating, and improved MQ, NetWeaver, and LoadRunner integration.

New in Wily Introscope 6 include:
  • Console Lens - the ability to create a template of a particular monitoring dashboard and be able to apply it dynamically to any application being managed (as opposed to creating custom dashboards per application).
  • LoadRunner integration - SNMP alert integration with LoadRunner to record when performance threshholds have been exceeded
  • PowerPack for MQ, and Interscope for SAP NetWeaver.
  • Introscope ErrorDetector - unlike most monitoring systems that record health based on the results of HTTP pings, even failed transactions will look like successful ones (immediate errors provide subsecond response times). ErrorDetector on the other hand can understand HTTP errors or stack traces to properly record when errors occur.
  • Upgrade to Performance Datastore - currently Introscope lets you record monitoring data for up to a year, for replay and analysis purposes. But the new version lets you also record transaction events, error and exception conditions, etc. This allows you to replay errors and exceptions down to the finegrained instance of a transaction.
  • Browser Response Time Adaptor Upgrade - The BRTA measures the response time between the user's browser and the application, taking into account network issues. In Wily 6, these transactions can be traced from browser through all the layers of an application, allowing you to monitor what how long a transaction takes at all tiers, even the network layer in between the browser and the JVM. They can even do things like measure average response times per-user/IP.
Being intrigued by this last feature, TSS asked how this is accomplished. Apparently, when a transaction is initatied from a browser, the return request to the browser from the server contains some custom Javascript that will then run in the users browser and initiate an asychronous return call back to the server giving them the total time it took between the server's return call and the browser receiving it. BRTA runs transparently and doesn't require changes to application code.

Wily also announced that it has been certified by BEA as supporting the WebLogic stack 8.1, and also has support for WL 9.

They also did a recent survey among 206 world wide large corporations, the results of which will be revealed later, but some of the interesting results they shared with us included:
  • the number of 10+ app deployments within the typical large company increased from 37% in 2003 to 59%
  • 54% are increasing application support teams, over 46.3% in 2003
  • the average availability of all apps remained 88%
  • the average availability for their best apps decreased from 95.2% to 92% in 2005.
Looks like 99.9999% uptime in the real world is not as prevalent as we thought. Kudos to Wily for sharing this information.