End-to-end Visibility
End to End Visibility: More Important Than You May Think
Gaining end-to-end visibility into today's distributed, interconnected applications is difficult. Processes execute across heterogeneous systems. These, in turn, often reside in different locations and are owned by different groups. As a result, it's hard to get a "big picture" of what's happening, or not happening, in the runtime environment.
But businesses need visibility to keep applications up and running smoothly, especially to assure critical business transaction process quickly and efficiently and meet service-level agreements (SLAs). IT organizations must be able to monitor service interactions, understand dependencies, and quickly pinpoint the root causes of performance bottlenecks or failures. Without these capabilities, deploying distributed, interconnected applications, especially for business functions that are revenue-generating or customer-facing, can put your business at risk.
End to End Visibility with Actional: No Coding. No Performance Impact. It Just Works.
Progress® Actional® Enterprise gives you unprecedented end-to-end visibility into the availability and performance of heterogeneous, distributed applications.
Figure: Actional provides automatic discovery of services and interdependencies.
End-to-end visibility features that Actional Enterprise delivers include:
- Unmatched integration and interoperability–for enterprise-wide monitoring and management. Actional easily integrates and interoperates with a wide range of heterogeneous computing resources–applications, data sources, network devices, middleware, and registries/repositories—and mediates multiple message protocols.
- Auto-discovery and mapping–with no coding. Actional's patented Flow Mapping™ technology automatically discovers services and maps interdependencies across numerous, mixed environments and protocols. As a result, you can better understand how services are being used and by whom, so you can make versioning and other changes with minimal impact and downtime. What's more, Flow Mapping does not require the coding or manual configuration that is necessary to achieve visibility with other products or home-grown approaches–improving development agility and providing substantial time and cost savings.
- Flow tracking across unmanaged nodes. Actional relates the data fields of the inbound messages to outbound messages in the unmanaged nodes. As a result, you have visibility into every process step including those on systems in the transaction path lacking an agent.
- Non-intrusive monitoring for low latency. Actional monitors end-to-end message flow with a non-invasive approach that takes advantage of existing application processing. As a result, monitoring and management produce just microseconds of latency and require less than 2% of CPU capacity.
- Visibility during service development–for high-quality applications from the start. Actional's Flow Mapping provides visibility throughout the lifecycle of distributed applications. It provides developers with insight into the behavior of a service on the host system and pre-production teams with transaction path visualization of a simulated (or an actual) production environment–for understanding dependencies.
Great Visibility–at a Low Total Cost of Ownership
Actional produces end-to-end visibility at a low TCO. Because discovery and tracking require no coding, Actional reduces IT time and costs. Because it produces little management overhead, you don't have to add expensive servers to boost performance. The Actional Management Server can handle more than 1000 managed nodes, so you can scale your distributed, interconnected application portfolio cost-effectively.
