Articles tagged Terracotta

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

Evident Software Announces Strategic Partnerships with Terracotta, EsperTech, Neo Technology, and Cirrus Technologies

Date: March 24, 2011
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

By John Bennett

GIGAOM STRUCTURE CONFERENCE AND NEW YORK, NY, March 23, 2011 — Evident Software, the leading provider of Application Performance Management (APM) for NOSQL, Java, and more, today announced that it has formed strategic partnerships with four advanced technology companies: Terracotta, EsperTech, Neo Technology, and Cirrus Technologies. Terracotta has selected Evident Software as a development partner for projects that include the Quartz Job Scheduler. Evident’s new software release, ClearStone 5.0, features the Esper Complex Event Processor from EsperTech and the Neo4j graph database from Neo Technology.

ClearStone 5.0 also features a PostgreSQL Management Pack developed by Cirrus Technologies for monitoring and managing PostgreSQL databases. Evident announced the new ClearStone release today at the GigaOm Structure Big Data Conference in New York City.

Terracotta and Evident Software

Terracotta is the leading provider of snap-in performance and scale for enterprise Java applications. The company selected Evident as a development partner.

Initially, Terracotta and Evident are working together on Quartz Job Scheduler. Quartz is a full-featured, open source job scheduling service that can be integrated with, or used alongside virtually any Java EE or Java SE application—from the smallest stand-alone application to the largest e-commerce system. Quartz can be used to create simple or complex schedules for executing tens, hundreds, or even tens of thousands of jobs.

“Evident Software has a proven track record of delivering visually rich monitoring and management solutions for enterprise applications, so they were an obvious choice for us when we were looking for a strategic development partner,” said Mike Allen, Head of Product Management for Terracotta.

EsperTech and the Esper Complex Event Processing Engine

Evident Software re-architected its ClearStone APM platform in the ClearStone 5.0 release, but kept one key component from earlier versions the software: the Esper Complex Event Processing (CEP) Engine. ClearStone 5.0 uses the Esper CEP Engine to aggregate data from a potentially ever-changing collection of resources, perform computations on metrics, build queries dynamically, and monitor resources for thresholds violations.

“Esper has provided essential capabilities to our ClearStone platform for several years now,” said Scott Barnett, CEO of Evident Software. “We began using the free, open source version of Esper in 2007 and soon after licensed their supported commercial version. We’ve always been thrilled with the company’s technology and support. We look forward to continuing our partnership with Esper as we extend the ClearStone platform to cover additional enterprise application components.”

“We are pleased that Evident Software is seeing Esper as a key enabler to its value offering. EsperTech will continue to advance the state-of-art in CEP applied to the domain of APM and to other domains,” said Thomas Bernhardt, CTO of EsperTech.

Neo Technology and the Neo4j Graph Database

Once data moves through the Esper Engine in ClearStone 5.0, ClearStone write it to a Neo4j graph database, which serves as an inventory database for all resources being monitored (e.g., processes, hosts, nodes, and clusters). ClearStone uses Neo4j to dynamically discover and map relationships among resources (e.g., a node running on a host), and to maintain a timeline of events related to each resource.

“Because the relationships among resources may be in flux and cannot be known ahead of time, we needed a flexible data store such as a graph database for this function,” said Barnett. “Neo4j turned out to be ideal for storing metadata for the resources and mapping relationships and correlated events.”

“ClearStone 5.0 demonstrates the type of high-performance, data-rich solutions that can be built on top of Neo4j,” said Emil Eifrem, CEO of Neo Technology. “We’re pleased that Evident chose Neo4j for their state-of-the-art APM platform.”

Cirrus Technologies and the PostgreSQL Management Pack

Jim Mlodgenski, CEO of Cirrus Technologies and former Chief Architect at EnterpriseDB, used ClearStone 5.0’s new Open Data Interface (ODI) to create a ClearStone Management Pack that enables ClearStone 5.0 to collect and correlate metrics and events from PostgreSQL databases. ClearStone correlates these metrics and events with those from other application components, such as MongoDB, a Cassandra data cache, or a jBoss application server, giving developers and data center operations staff a multi-tier view of a Postgres application.

“I was impressed by the architecture and open interface of the ClearStone 5.0 Platform,” said Mlodgenski. “Working from Evident’s ODI documentation, I was able to quickly create a Management Pack that collects PostgreSQL metrics and events through ClearStone’s RESTful interface. Now developers, DBAs, and others can take advantage of the rich visual interface of ClearStone to monitor applications built on PostgreSQL. Instead of relying on home-grown tools, PostgreSQL users can leverage existing open source scripts and take advantage of a much richer monitoring solution that shows not just PostgreSQL metrics but also interactions between PostgreSQL and other tiers in the application stack.”

The PostgreSQL Management Pack is available as an extension to the ClearStone APM Platform.
ClearStone is available for download on the Evident Software Web site, www.evidentsoftware.com.

About Evident Software, Inc.

Evident Software delivers the first comprehensive application performance management solution for NOSQL, Java applications and more. 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.

###

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

View Comments

NoSQL Logging, NoSQL Reporting & Performance Monitoring with ClearStone 4.5

Date: November 14, 2010
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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!

View Comments