Articles tagged jBoss

The views expressed in this blog are strictly personal, and do not necessarily represent the views of Evident Software.

Evident ClearStone v5.0 – A new product for the NoSQL DB era

Date: February 28, 2011
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By Scott Barnett

We are about to release our newest version of ClearStone.

We have learned a lot over the past few years, serving customers in the Oracle Coherence and Data Synapse markets, as well as over the past 6 months as we turned our focus to NoSQL DBs – see our product section on NoSQL DB Logging and Reporting.  ClearStone 5.0 introduces the concept of Application Performance Management for NoSQL and MORE.  What do we mean by NoSQL and MORE?

First, we firmly believe that NoSQL (or whatever it is ultimately called) will be the next major tier of the application stack. As such, it will need all of the tools, from development and deployment to, yes, management. There are some basic monitoring capabilities available today for NoSQL DBs, but they are hardly enough.  They lack the detail, scope and actionable capabilities that most DevOps folks are used to.  At the same time, monitoring NoSQL by itself is not satisfactory – in order to get a holistic view of any web, cloud or enterprise application, developers and operations will need to see what’s going on at all levels of the application – from the system level to in-memory cache and everything in between.

So, ClearStone 5.0 was developed to move us even more firmly in the direction of holistic application management with a direct focus on NoSQL. It’s a release intended to address the reality that many applications using NoSQL are leveraging cloud assets and need a tool that can handle dynamic environments combining traditional Java stacks, NoSQL data caching, and virtual cloud environments.  Under the hood, we’ve replaced our internal caching mechanism in 4.x with a combination of Cassandra and a graph database that allow us to store more information, and provide better correlation/relationship mapping of assets between tiers in the application.   We kept (and continue to improve) our really slick user interface. We’re working to provide additional capabilities for people to get custom reports and specific views into their data.

The biggest change in 5.0 is the introduction of an API (we’re calling it the RESTful Data Interface) that lets you instrument metrics, KPIs, and SLAs for any IT asset using a scripting-friendly, XML-over-HTTP interface. We now support built-in collection of application-level metrics from platforms such as JBoss, WebLogic, and Tomcat and will introduce built-in collection of system-level metrics, such as UNIX SAR (system activity recorder). The new back end enables correlation of all collected metrics and events, including custom metrics/events, and real-time visibility into historical performance data without requiring a relational database.

We’ve been embracing the increasingly popular DevOps model, so that both developers and operations can take advantage of the platform. Specific new features for developers (especially during testing) include the ability to:

  • Define SLAs and conditions for alerting
  • Analyze performance, capacity, and utilization across multiple applications/systems
  • Tag resources into logical groups for easy reporting
  • View both real-time and historical performance data from a single interface

ClearStone 5.0 dramatically extends what we can manage, and provides much more flexibility and openness via the API. The architecture changes also allow us to become “cloud-friendly” and has prompted a dramatic pricing change where we will charge via a subscription based on the number of “resources” you are managing, not by server/core counts. By the way, the first 10 resources will be free! Beyond that, pricing will start at $10/resource/month, so you can start small and work your way up.  Now, not only the product is elastic, our pricing is too.  For those larger companies that only want to give us large sums of money, we still support ELA and all-you-can-eat prices for environments greater than 1,000 managed resources.

We will be beta testing 5.0 starting February 14, and plan to GA in mid-March. To sign up for the beta, go to http://www.evidentsoftware.com/clearstone-5-0-beta-program and fill out the form.  We’ll be taking the first 50 users in the beta program, and I hope you’ll be one of them!  I look forward to your feedback on our new software and our new direction!

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Evident ClearStone 4.6 Gives DevOps and Support Teams New Monitoring and Troubleshooting Tools for JBoss, WebLogic, and NoSQL DBs

Date: December 14, 2010
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By John Bennett

New Software Release Adds Operational Health Dashboard and Fine-Grained Alerting

ASBURY PARK, NJ, December 14, 2010 — Evident Software, the leading provider of Application Performance Management (APM) for NoSQL, data caching, and Java applications, today announced the availability of Evident ClearStone® 4.6, the company’s production-class solution for monitoring and managing all tiers of enterprise applications. ClearStone 4.6 introduces new features to help development, operations, and support teams monitor and troubleshoot business-critical applications. Using ClearStone 4.6, engineers can correlate the status of JBoss or WebLogic application servers with other data tiers, such as a Cassandra NoSQL DB tier or system-level metrics. This multi-tier correlation helps engineers rapidly identify the root cause of performance problems.

New Features Improve Visibility and Accelerate Troubleshooting

ClearStone 4.6 introduces an Operational Health Dashboard that enables engineers to discover at a glance the health of application resources. ClearStone determines each resource’s health based on system metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs), and the status of events. The Operational Health Dashboard presents green, yellow, and red indicators of a resource’s health over time. Support engineers can click on a health indicator to discover the underlying details and to read troubleshooting tips written by the applications developers. By putting this information at a support engineer’s fingertips, ClearStone 4.6 accelerates troubleshooting and helps bridge the divide between Development and Operations.

ClearStone 4.6 also introduces fine-grained alerting that enables specific users or groups of users to be notified when specific conditions occur. This fine-grained alerting helps developers and operations teams ensure that the proper people are notified when specific error conditions or outages occur.

“With the release of ClearStone 4.6, we’re giving developers and operations engineers unprecedented visibility into enterprise and Web applications, including ‘Internet-scale’ applications that work with vast amounts of data,” said Scott Barnett, CEO of Evident Software. “ClearStone lets developers and operations engineers see all tiers of an application, now including the JBoss or WebLogic application server tier, in a ‘single pane of glass.’ This comprehensive view of real-time and historical data gives IT departments the information they need in order to optimize application performance.”

Web Seminar with Sneak Preview of ClearStone 5.0

Evident Software will present a Web seminar on “The Present and Future of Application Performance Management for NoSQL and Data Caching Architectures” at 2 pm EST on Wednesday, December 15, 2010. To register, please visit: http://www.evidentsoftware.com/category/news-events/events/.

About Evident Software, Inc.

Evident Software delivers the first comprehensive application performance management solution for NoSQL, data caching and Java applications. The company’s ClearStone platform enables developers and operations personnel to monitor, manage, and optimize business-critical and Internet-scale applications. Evident’s solutions are installed in the financial, SaaS/cloud, e-commerce, government and IT services industries. The company is based in Newark, N.J. with research and development facilities in Asbury Park, N.J.

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Evident ClearStone is a registered trademark of Evident Software. All other trade names are the property of their respective owners.

For media inquiries, please contact:

John Bennett (for Evident Software)
john@bennettstrategy.com
+1 510-495-6590

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NoSQL Logging, NoSQL Reporting & Performance Monitoring with ClearStone 4.5

Date: November 14, 2010
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By Scott Barnett

Last month, we launched Evident ClearStone 4.5, which includes NoSQL logging and NoSQL reporting features. This software release marks an important milestone in the evolution of Evident Software. Over the summer, we made a decision to aggressively go after the NoSQL DB market, expanding our previous support for compute-grid technologies such as DataSynapse and application-grid technologies such as Oracle Coherence by offering NoSQL reporting, NoSQL logging, management and performance monitoring.

Why make this change of course? There were several reasons:

  1. NoSQL might not still be called “NoSQL” in a few years, but it absolutely will be an important technology for enterprise applications. Think back to how the Java Application Server came of age in the mid/late 1990′s. That technology required several iterations to become the Java Application Server. The market took a few years to coalesce and turn into something that the broad industry could understand, market, and build around. Today NoSQL is going through a similar evolution. We’re just starting to see forecasts of the size of the NoSQL market. We suspect it won’t be called NoSQL a year from now (some other people seem to agree) – as technologies such as Hadoop, Data Caching Platforms such as Coherence, GemFire, Terracotta and hybrid in-memory databases such as VoltDB all vie for developer mind-share. Whatever it’s called, this is the “new” tier in the application stack, and it’s going to need focused and dedicated capabilities from a management/monitoring perspective, including NoSQL logging and NoSQL reporting. Here’s a great database (no pun intended) of systems that fall into the NoSQL realm.
  2. Correlating metrics and events between the NoSQL tier and the other existing tiers in the application (and system) stack will be key capabilities for monitoring and managing NoSQL applications. Each tier cannot continue to have its own NoSQL logging and monitoring capabilities – monitoring needs to be integrated, so enterprises can get a holistic view of their applications. This is a hard problem to solve.It’s also a valuable problem to solve. We are solving this problem already now for the caching technologies I listed above. Now we want continue extending this capability across the different tiers of the application stack.
  3. Visualization is the key to success in APM. When you are gathering so many metrics/events in real time, it’s a challenge to determine what is really important to DevOps.. We’ve been told we’ve done a great job of figuring this one out – our user interface is intuitive, attractive, and meaningful. Making sense of all that data is hard to do. Without it, you have lots of great data with no insight. You need insight to make good decisions.
  4. Our goal is to support every NoSQL system out there. To meet this goal requires a change of strategy – so you will see us open up our platform so that people can build and deploy their own “Management Packs.” We currently have Management Packs for DataSynapse GridServer, Oracle Coherence, Apache Cassandra, Memcached (with Membase coming very soon), WebLogic Server, and jBoss. We are working on many more, but we want to move even faster. So you will see a Management Pack framework that allows developers to build their own Management Packs (we can help you too!). It is not hard to do this, and we will roll out a developer site shortly for people to share/collaborate/contribute. We will start by contributing our own management packs to the site.

So, 4.5 is the next step in our evolution and a hearty step forward in our embrace of all things NoSQL as the latest, greatest participant in the application stack. From our conversations with customers and prospects over the past few months, we know many of you agree our vision of NoSQL reporting, monitoring and management. We look forward to working with you on this initiative in the months and years ahead. We are very interested in your thoughts, ideas, and suggestions on how to continue this process, so please share your ideas with us!

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