May 16, 2006

Today, Wily has released its 7.0 version of Introscope, an application that handles the monitoring and management of Internet-based applications. We had a talk with Mark Donsky, Wily's Product Manager, to learn more about Introscope.

Mark began by putting the product's importance in context: "There isn't a single business process that hasn't been Webified," he says. "Increasingly today, Web applications are becoming more and more critical and to a growing number of businesses."

The problem is that, as the Web's role in driving business processes deepens, so do surrounding complexity problems. "The transactions are flowing through technology stacks," Donsky explains. " It isn't just a single app server or tech stack." Meanwhile, companies are implementing an increasing number of Web-based transactions, with some Wily customers managing thousands of applications.

Wily's solution to the complexity problem begins at the level of discovery. Once launched, Wily goes through your technology stack and finds all your Web applications.

It then puts them into a portal view in which the left-hand side is a hierarchical menu that is easily navigated. It begins with a Super Domain, and drills down into appliance and applications.

Wily showed Line56 some screen shots that captured information from BEA WebLogic running on an HP machine. The left frame showed the hierarchy and the right frame captured a ton of specific information (application name, back-end summary, event logs, etc).

Simply put, this part of the Wily portal gives you both high-level and detailed views of the state of your Web applications. The product gives you proactive warnings based on historical configuration trending (in our screen shot, Wily issued a warning that the host's CPU utilization was unusual) and provides a red-yellow-green light warning system that displays problems both visually and prominently.

It came as quite a revelation that Web application monitoring, which historically brings up visions of log printouts and multiple screens, can be condensed into such a simple yet detailed presentation.

Of course, things go get more complex once you get past the stage of seeing what's wrong. For example, detailed analysis can require you to get into Wily's Transaction Trace Viewer tool. "This has the ability to give deep insight into how a transaction flowed through different pieces of architecture," Donsky explains.

The basic screen view is set up by duration, a manner of presentation that recalls music and video editing software in its emphasis on the time axis. There's a continuum that begins at 0 milliseconds and unfolds to the right, up to 1.6 seconds in our screen shot.

This is very relevant to, e.g., customer experiences on your website. Say that a customer goes to your website to create a "user profile" for themselves. In today's services-rich world, the user profile creation may launch not one application but a bunch of back-end Web services to get the job done.

If that sounds too 'techie,' let's simplify it. Think of the customer request to create a profile as a house catching on fire. What happens next necessarily involves a complex response.

You call the fire department, the fire truck shows up and taps into the hydrants, and the firefighters craft their response on the scene. If there's a stumble on any of these steps, the whole system stumbles. So, if no one notices the fire immediately, or if the firefighters can't work with each other fast enough, or if the hydrant isn't working, etc., the end result is that the fire won't get put out in time.

This may be a very rough example, but to me it has some resonance with the world of Web services. Everything has to go smoothly for the fire to be put, and Web services, too, have to work with each other smoothly to discover and put out the "fire" of a customer request.

This doesn't always happen. In the Wily screen shot, we saw a Web service that took 1.6 seconds to start executing. That could have cascading effects, because this service has another service to call and so on down the line. The end result is that the house burns down -- the customer is hit with a long waiting time, and leaves your site.

The Transaction Trace Viewer lets you see duration problems like this at a granular level.

For example, if ten Web services are involved in the execution of a particular function and one of them is much later than the others, you see it immediately.

Indeed, the viewer can be used a basis for rationalizing the multiple Web services associated with a transaction and sharpening up your coding. "You can see if you're invoking a Web service many times to get information whereas you should really optimize for one," Donsky says. "You can see poorly written code running anywhere in the technology stack."

Wily's Introscope 7 addresses this and the other issues of Web application management via one interface. "It's a huge engineering effort for Wily, and the hub of all transaction management," Donsky concludes.

Source: Line 56