News

Tidal Rolls Out SOA Monitoring Solution

• By Kurt Mackie
• June 25, 2007

Tidal Intersperse 7 is runtime-agnostic and protocol-agnostic solution. It monitors and manages applications based on Java, Web services and .NET platforms. The solution can drill down to component and resource levels, but it now has the ability to perform high-level monitoring via dashboard views, according to Rod Butters, Tidal's senior vice president of worldwide marketing.

"We've created some dashboards out of the box to get people started," Butters said. The system lets users compose service-level metrics at a very high level to capture overall business processes, he added.

The high-level functions are a new feature in Tidal Intersperse 7, but the solution's strength is in providing system-level views via lower level measurements. It's not fixed at the high-level, like some solutions.

"Our approach works from the bottom up," Butters said. "We actually start with detailed runtime monitoring. We actually can do bite code instrumentation of things like Java runtime or Microsoft.NET runtime CLR. We can also do monitoring of Web services and various message busses in that environment.

"We can build a complete map of what the application looks like. And also allow people to annotate that as needed," he said.

The product works with various application platforms, such as those from BEA, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP, as well as Tomcat, JBoss, JSR-168 portlets and Spring and Hibernate platforms.

Tidal Intersperse 7 runs across heterogeneous systems, supporting SOAs across various purpose-built technologies that companies have accumulated over the years. While some companies working in the SOA space offer various components to provide complete solutions for the enterprise, such as an enterprise service bus (ESB), governance solutions and more, Tidal Software concentrates on the network monitoring portion. 

"We're more focused on the monitoring piece of this," Butters said. "One thing that's confusing is that there's a lot of overlap of the technologies between governance and ESB and governance and a monitoring solution. A lot of the governance solutions live in the middle of those things. We're not trying to tell people they need an ESB or governance solution. For most people, the adoption of these technologies is going to be evolutionary and incremental, where they are choosing things to solve a problem. So, from that standpoint, we're really focused on providing them with a monitoring solution that helps them get their solutions deployed, manage them in production, and then understand how these things are supporting, or problems are impacting or potentially impacting, their business."

Tidal is primarily focused on providing automation and performance management solutions. While the company originally started out providing packaged application management solutions, it has since expanded to support the SOA market in the last year. The company's latest product resulted from the purchase of Intersperse in 2006, Butters said.