Just as a fitness monitor checks a runner’s heartbeat and pace during a run, health monitoring software allows a business to know when an application isn’t performing optimally. Monitoring software is nothing new, but most software on the market approaches systematic bottlenecks from a technical standpoint, rather than putting the power in the hands of the business in a secure and meaningful way.
“We built Infrared360 differently than all other vendor products that did this before.”
“We built Infrared360® differently than all other vendor products that did this before,” says Peter D’Agosta, Infrared360 product manager at Avada Software. “We came about it from a business unit point of view, where everybody else did it from a topological point of view. When you’re in a business unit of a company and you want to effectively manage things you are responsible for, you don’t necessarily want to ask a central group to manage it for you. If you want to see just the servers and applications and middleware that are important to your applications, then that’s all you should see.”
Infrared360® —a web management portal for general health and performance monitoring, testing, auditing, reporting and administration—is designed specifically to work with application middleware, including the IBM WebSphere stack. If the software detects a problem, like an application breaking down or the messaging object malfunctioning, administrators can review, identify, and work in collaboration with others in the business unit to resolve the issue through an administration portal.
Rather than sort through hundreds or thousands of servers, Infrared360® allows users to set up trusted spaces that act as delegated management and administration areas, known as secure sandboxes. These virtual, compartmentalized units allow team members to work on one project at a time, focusing on just their task at hand, without any risk to other applications.
“Say you’re using an application [for] insurance claims,” he explains. “I could say I want you to come in and work on a problem I’m having with the claims application. With previous solutions, you could go in and work on the claims application, as well as any other application in the system, which is dangerous. Even though I’ve got your help on the claims application, I do that at the risk you might delete something that’s important. And for that reason, it makes it difficult to solicit your help.”
Some companies have as many as 90 different business units with only one administrator handling a backlog of changes, in an effort to avoid the risk posed by business users having unfettered access to applications on the servers. This can slow the entire process, reports D’Agosta.
“Typically a central administrative person is asked to do all those things for them,” he explains. “I used to do that job personally at a bank. What happens is these different business units are constantly asking you, ‘Can you change this? Can you update that?’ You start this, stop that, change this value, and all this stuff goes back to the central administrator. They become a bottleneck, creating a backlog.”
Every other product on the market, according to D’Agosta, gives a user full authority to access any part of the server, but not Infrared360. Instead, users can bookmark some things for immediate access and block access to others. It segments systems for business use into a more focused environment, controlling