Aternity has updated its application monitoring platform so that it can monitor Ajax-styled Web applications as well as 64-bit Java desktop applications, the company announced Tuesday.
Aternity’s software monitors applications to see how responsive they are in day-to-day operations. The software aggregates performance data and offers summaries of how well applications are performing.
“This is software that sits on a desktop that monitors the activities of the application,” said Trevor Matz, Aternity president and CEO. “It can monitor any application without any knowledge of that application. It uses a unique technology that can see the underlying events in the technology stack.”
The newly released Aternity FPI (Frontline Performance Intelligence) Platform version 5 contains a number of new enhancements. Most notably, it is able to monitor performance of Ajax-styled Web applications, those that use JavaScript and the HTML (DOM) Document Object Model for rich interactivity. Previous versions focused on monitoring thick client applications.
“Rich Internet Applications are a new animal, because there is a lot of client-side processing,” Matz said. While Ajax is currently supported, the company does not provide support yet for Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight-based Web applications, though support for these technologies may come in future editions of the product, he said.
The program can also, for the first time, monitor Java 64-bit desktop applications. Previous versions could only monitor 32-bit Java applications.
Matz said that many of the company’s customers have moved to 64-bit Java applications. “The reason many large financial companies have moved to Windows 7 is that they want to have support on the desktop for extended memory addressing, and as a result, they are taking advantage of the new platform to port their applications to 64-bit Java,” Matz said.
The software also provides a deeper glimpse into one of the most widely used enterprise applications, Microsoft Outlook. Previous versions of the software just monitored how swiftly the e-mail client ran. The new version monitors many of the attributes that can slow Outlook performance, such as local database size, e-mail size, number of e-mails in the inbox and plug-in performance.
“You can monitor not just the transactional performance of Outlook, but all the internal performance impacting components that influence transactional performance,” Matz said.
Aternity FPI Platform version 5 will be available by the end of June. Typical enterprise installations will start at about US$100,000.
Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab’s e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com