ManageEngine, the real-time IT management company, today announced its performance monitoring software package, Applications Manager, now supports monitoring of the Microsoft Windows Azure cloud platform and applications running on the platform as well as monitoring of transactions in .NET environments. The company also introduced the Applications Manager Cloud Starter Edition for organizations looking to quickly leverage a proven, cost-effective solution for monitoring their cloud services.

With more revenue-critical applications on PaaS systems such as Windows Azure, organizations need to proactively and cost-effectively monitor the performance of their cloud-based applications to maximize uptime and to optimize capacity planning. Meanwhile, the success of .NET means that more IT departments have growing numbers of .NET applications running in both traditional and cloud environments, requiring the extension of performance monitoring to include the Microsoft framework.

“Traditionally, SaaS companies prefer to build versus buy their monitoring software,” said Gibu Mathew, director of product management at ManageEngine. “But today, those companies have less time to build monitoring solutions that are becoming increasingly complex. We’ve refined Applications Manager to address the complexity of supporting Windows Azure and .NET. We’ve also addressed IT departments’ time — and cash — crunch with a starter edition that lets users monitor public clouds and apps out of the box as well as retain the flexibility they need for monitoring their cloud services.”

Applications Manager Refinements

The Windows Azure monitoring support in Applications Manager helps IT administrators ensure their business-critical applications running on the Windows Azure platform are performing optimally at all times. It helps IT administrators to view the performance of web, worker and VM roles, troubleshoot performance issues proactively and also optimize resource usage. Among its many benefits, Windows Azure monitoring lets IT professionals:

• Discover Windows Azure applications and all role instances
• Monitor the different states of Windows Azure role instances, receive alerts for critical states and troubleshoot before end users are affected
• Monitor CPU usage, memory and network traffic of VMs
• Monitor request execution time, requests rejected and TCP connections of web apps

The latest release of Applications Manager also includes .NET transaction monitoring to help development teams identify slow spots in transactions by showing method level traces and database queries. Similarly, Applications Manager now provides Apdex user experience scores for .NET components, helping IT communicate application performance achievements to the line of business managers in business-friendly language.

Finally, the new Applications Manager Cloud Starter Edition targets organizations looking to launch cloud-based offerings. Like the rest of the Applications Manager editions, the Cloud Starter Edition is easy to deploy and provides a simple, easy-to-use interface for monitoring physical, virtual and cloud entities. The Cloud Starter Edition supports monitoring of private and public clouds as well as Linux servers, virtualization software such as VMware or in-memory databases like Memcached, and messaging software like RabbitMQ. Organizations having a much broader portfolio of applications — including commercial, packaged applications — in their data center can opt for either Professional or Enterprise editions of Applications Manager.

Pricing and Availability

Applications Manager 10.8 is available immediately with prices starting at $795 for up to 25 servers or applications. Applications Manager Cloud Starter Edition is also available immediately with prices starting at $495 for up to 50 servers or applications. A free, fully functional, 30-day trial version is available at http://ow.ly/7evOs.