ClearApp gauges Oracle SOA Suite performance

ClearApp is upgrading its application service management product, QuickVision, delivering metrics and measurement to Oracle SOA Suite users.

QuickVision 7.5 enables Oracle users in heterogeneous environments to view a top-down topology of their SOA applications, ClearApp said. Users are able to drill down from high-level transactions from the Oracle Application Server into SOA components and servers.

“Basically, the problem we’re solving has to do with the complexity of managing this environment due to multiple layers of abstraction,” said Rob Greer, ClearApp vice president of marketing.

Complementing the Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g SOA Management Pack, QuickVision 7.5 shortens incident resolution time and can eliminate performance bottlenecks before they affect users, ClearApp said.

“We bridge the IT visibility gap that companies are experiencing with these complex composite apps,” Greer said. This is done by leveraging a services modeling engine that dynamically associates application services to underlying code components.

Version 7.5 integrates with Oracle BPEL Process Manager to generate a visual model connecting BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) workflows to underlying Web services, enterprise service buses, and J2EE Java resources.

Also, QuickVision provides problem management from a single console, offering root cause analysis and trending to isolate bottlenecks and diagnosing SOA application performance problems within a business context, ClearApp said.

Application visibility is provided across application middleware in heterogeneous environments, enabling, for example, views into Oracle BPEL Process Manager running on the BEA Systems WebLogic Server application server. Real-time change management also is provided to assess the effect of dependency changes on service levels.

ClearApp offers a discovery engine that understands how an application is running, providing more detail and a more accurate description of transactions, said analyst Richard Ptak, of Ptak, Noel & Associates. Oracle users thus get faster and better information, he said. “They get finer grained detail,” about what is critical in the application and how it is functioning, he added.

Other features in QuickVision 7.5 include automatic generation of enterprise dashboards customized to user roles; remote log access to improve mean-time-to-repair, and a Java 6 plug-in to the QuickVision administration console.

The new version of QuickVision also supports the IBM WebSphere 6.1 application server as well as the JBoss application server.

QuickVision 7.5 is available in a beta release next week, with general availability planned for February 2008. Perpetual licensing has a list price of $12,500 per CPU while a 90-day subscription costs $700 per monitored CPU, based on list pricing.