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!
Related Articles:
- Why and How NetFlix Adopted NoSQL Databases (readwriteweb.com)
- NoSQL: NoSQL tutorial: Redis with Spring Data (themindstorms.blogspot.com)
- Jaspersoft open sources Big Data connectors (go.theregister.com)
- RealWorld NoSQL: Cassandra at Openwave (nytimes.com)
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