Active Context TrackingTM (ACT) Technology
CoreFirst provides 24x7, cross-tier transaction visibility into a multi-tier IT infrastructure from both the Business and IT perspectives. While the Business and IT would both like to know which services were consumed by whom and how quickly they were delivered, IT is further interested in which components participated in the service delivery and what was the effect on the overall infrastructure. With CoreFirst, application owners and infrastructure managers can see which business transactions are being processed by each and every server and tier in their domain.
Transactions are composed of multiple work units that are executed on multiple application tiers such as web, application and database servers. A fundamental challenge to understanding transaction activity is that these work units operate in isolation from one another and usually lack any business transaction context (e.g., data access at the database level and EJBs on application servers). CoreFirst uses patent-pending Active Context Tracking (ACT) technology to associate work units with the logical business transaction instances to which they belong, all in real time.
The result is true cross-tier production monitoring of business transactions and the ability to view transaction response times and resource consumption broken down by tier, in real time. This capability enables multiple parts of the IT organization to work in tandem, with the same accurate, real-world picture of service delivery issues.
CoreFirst showing users, transaction counts, service levels and the tiers on which the transactions where executed
Identify issues quickly and reduce outages
CoreFirst has a built-in real time ability to continually benchmark business transactions performance across tiers and provide alerts when SLAs are breached. CoreFirst alerts uniquely relate to business impact and are raised as soon as any degradation in business transaction performances is spotted, well before system and component monitors notice a problem. CoreFirst can further be used to benchmark application tiers (such as databases and application servers) and provide complete visibility into business transaction execution on any tier. This capability enables IT to quickly comprehend, and subsequently attend to, any issues originating from particular tiers or nodes.
CoreFirst showing a transaction execution with a bottleneck in the authentication process
Isolate production problems and understand business impact in near real time
CoreFirst keeps a full record for every business transaction that had executed in any system it monitors, so you can easily track every transaction’s execution throughout customer facing systems, backend supporting systems, and shared services environments, pointing out how much time was spent at each stop and how many resources were consumed. CoreFirst also shows chatty transactions, specific bottlenecks, and tier specific metrics from a transaction perspective. CoreFirst dramatically reduces time to isolation of issues and increases application support team efficiency.
Reduce the latency of business transactions
CoreFirst’s unique perspective on performance, the cross-tier business transaction, makes it especially powerful in identifying transaction latency improvement opportunities and design flaws which are slowing down performance. CoreFirst automatically calculates “chattiness” of individual transactions and pinpoints scalability hotspots (transactions that are not going to scale well). It also correlates transaction performance with resource consumption and helps to pinpoint resource hogs. CoreFirst automatically maintains a dynamic topology map for every transaction type (without the need for any modeling work) and shows where every transaction spends its time. This unique visibility enables OpTier customers to reduce latencies of multiple transactions by an order of magnitude.
CoreFirst showing a transaction making 1,400 calls to a database during a single invocation
Deploy applications confidently
CoreFirst is deployed in production environments as well as in test and UAT environments. The data derived from production monitoring represents the best source of information for QA and application teams to baseline and validate their load testing scenarios and configurations and to increase test coverage. Application and business owners, as well as operations staff, know that there is often a time of turmoil after changes or rollouts to production are made. It takes time to see how changes are being accepted and impact system performance and stability. CoreFirst provides a margin of safety for production rollouts and updates by providing visibility into any change in flow or behavior and any degradation caused by a new release.
Provide complete visibility into shared services environments
CoreFirst tracks transactions across IT environments, including shared services environments (such as SOA shared services, Grids, and proprietary shared environments). It provides complete visibility into transaction execution within these environments. Complete visibility into SLA compliance, resource consumption, and business transaction usage trends enables organizations to adopt a shared service model quicker and with more confidence. It enables activity-based costing and supports shared services owners in workload and capacity planning as well as business unit reporting and application support. CoreFirst is a critical component of managing large shared services environments.
