BlueStripe Software, the industry’s first provider of Application Service Management (ASM) solutions for today’s dynamic data centers, today launched FactFinder 2.0, the latest version of its flagship product that enables enterprises to confidently stage, deploy, and manage business‐critical applications. FactFinder 2.0 extends the reach of its intelligent application discovery and unique service-level driven capabilities for application support to Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments, enabling unsurpassed intelligence into the performance and behavior of these applications. This allows users to understand the structure and relationship of their applications to efficiently manage complex, integrated applications, identify performance issues, and perform triage to resolve issues.

“As enterprises drive to newer application architectures, like SOA and Web 2.0, IT departments must consider deploying model-based application management tools, as traditional monitoring and management tools will no longer suffice,” stated Milind Govekar, research vice president, Gartner, Inc. “New solutions are needed and are becoming available in the market that are able to build a relationship model in real-time on how a business transaction executes in a heterogeneous computing environment. This is needed to perform improved service-level reporting with active baselining, better root-cause analysis, and becomes valuable technology for improved IT service delivery, through ITSM and BSM projects, in line with the business requirements.”

Before FactFinder, visibility into the performance of business-critical applications was limited, creating delays in isolating and resolving application performance issues, diminishing the ROI of virtualization efforts, and limiting the quality of new application roll-outs. But as organizations today continue to demand service-level intelligence on application performance, FactFinder is meeting the challenge. In its first six months on the market, it has garnered extensive attention, including a Best of VMworld 2008 Finalist by TechTarget Inc.’s SearchServerVirtualization.com in the application and infrastructure management category and as an eWEEK IT Infrastructure “Product to Watch.”

Building on the award-winning release of FactFinder, this latest release offers a unique set of capabilities in support of BlueStripe’s service-level driven approach to application problem triage and resolution. New features include:

• Automatic Discovery and Mapping: Within 10 minutes, FactFinder automatically discovers application topologies across both physical and virtual environments, revealing all connections, processes and dependencies, and providing detailed service-level delivery performance metrics;
• Health and Performance Measurement: Detailed performance intelligence is gathered to benchmark critical application performance attributes, including response time contributions, enabling before and after snapshots for Comparison Reports on performance and configuration changes, and;
• Service-level Driven Triage: Enables users to follow service-levels to identify performance degradation and quickly identify where they need to drill down to resolve application performance issues.
  

Roll-out New Business Applications with Confidence

FactFinder provides powerful new application service management capabilities for customers who choose to run open source, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle Enterprise Linux and CentOS. With the ability to truly manage business-critical applications running on open source with FactFinder, enterprises can roll out new applications with confidence.

“Our customer base runs heterogeneous IT environments – using both open source and commercial software – as such, we recognize the need to broaden our platform support to industry-leading platforms,” said BlueStripe co-founder and CEO Chris Neal. “BlueStripe is committed to supporting Linux for mission-critical deployments in the data center. By offering the only solution that provides the intelligence to manage and support these production applications, we deliver value to those customers who have embraced open source by deploying on Red Hat Enterprise Linux platforms.”

Service-Level Approach to Managing Applications

In today’s dynamic data centers, enterprises must take a service-level driven approach to managing business-critical applications, regardless of platform, operating system, or if deployed in physical of virtual environments. Only by managing the application, not the systems on which they reside, can companies truly understand what is impacting the performance of their critical applications and quickly take action to resolve those issues.

FactFinder employs a unique service-level driven approach to application triage, enabling users to follow the service level hop-by-hop across application tiers, identify the offending server, and drill down through each layer in the server stack to identify the root cause of application performance issues. It automatically discovers and maps the application, highlighting process-level dependencies from end-to-end, captures detailed performance metrics to measure the application’s health and performance, and provides quick triage capabilities when problems arise.

FactFinder provides the intelligence to manage and support production applications, with the tools to measure application health and performance, or the ability to triage critical business applications during P2V conversions or new application roll-outs.

Availability and Pricing

FactFinder 2.0 is now available. Pricing starts at $10,000, depending on the number of servers and consoles required.