New version uses fewer system resources Quest Software on Tuesday announced plans to ship PerformaSure 2.0, a software product for monitoring the performance of distributed J2EE applications that is designed to be lightweight enough for use in production environments.The new version will take up fewer system resources than Quest’s existing PerformaSure 1.7 product, which was designed for preproduction environments, said Josephine Coombe, Quest’s director of marketing, J2EE Solutions. PerformaSure 2.0 can be applied to live environments to analyze large transactions without compromising system performance, she said.The software is scheduled to be available in March with a starting price of $25,000 for a base license, the company said. By reconstructing the execution path of each user transaction, the software drills into J2EE applications to analyze, diagnose, and repair performance problems, she said. Reconstructing the execution path of each transaction makes it possible to “pinpoint more rapidly the performance-problem events and series of events that led to the degradation” of an application’s performance, she said.The software uses Quest’s Tag-and-Follow technology to analyze end-user transactions across all application tiers and user levels, Coombe said.Within a “tree-view” that displays systemwide J2EE transaction activity, poorly performing applications are highlighted by color hot spots. These help systems administrators identify, isolate and repair performance problems with applications, she said. PerformaSure 2.0 will be available for BEA Systems’ WebLogic and IBM’s WebSphere application servers. It will also work with database servers including Oracle’s Oracle9i, IBM’s DB2, and Microsoft’s SQL Server. Software Development