The latest such tools?also known as component and service-level agreement management tools?are designed to help IT departments keep a close eye on critical Web-enabled systems. As these systems grow larger and reach outside the enterprise to customers, partners and suppliers, the need to keep performance at the highest possible level becomes ever more pressing. That’s not always easy, however. "The new Internet applications have multiple tiers?they’re distributive and complex," says Dennis Gaughan, a software industry analyst at AMR Research, a technology research company in Boston. "There’s just an increased demand for tools to measure performance and to make sure that the applications are performing to meet the requirements of the business."

Performance management technology has been around for decades, helping users wring maximum value out of servers, storage, networks and other components. But the newest tools lift oversight from individual components and subsystems to a new holistic, business-focused level. Bill Gassman, a software analyst at Gartner, a Stamford, Conn.-based technology research company, offers an aviation metaphor: "It’s the difference between knowing that your airplanes are flying at 550 mph, burning so much fuel, and knowing whether your flights are making it on time." In other words, the objective is to gain a bottom-line insight on system performance.

Multiple Paths

As the need for Web-based performance management practices grows, CIOs can pick from an array of products and services. McLean, Va.-based Managed Objects, for example, offers Formula?software that sits on top of the system and retrieves data from various underlying vendor management tools, such as Hewlett-Packard’s OpenView and Tivoli Enterprise Console, as well as a variety of other information reporting sources. The product continuously examines the relationship between the performance data and business concerns in real-time or over a period of time. Formula then customizes the information and delivers it to designated users.

Dirig Software, based in Nashua, N.H., features an agent-based technology that collects information without relying on underlying management software. The company’s Dirig Agent offers real-time and historical monitoring capabilities of server functions, such as CPU, memory, disk-space utilization, log monitoring and process monitoring (the observation of application executables). It also can take automatic corrective actions when systems exceed specified thresholds.

Mercury Interactive, located in Sunnyvale, Calif., also uses an agent-driven technology. The company’s Topaz software can continuously monitor the availability of more than 40 aspects of the Web infrastructure, including the performance of servers, load balancers and the Internet backbone, from inside and outside the firewall. An ASP version of Mercury’s software, ActiveWatch, is also available.