ActiveServices Toolbox

There are two schools of thought when it comes to methods for monitoring the performance and availability of IT infrastructure; active and passive. Passive agent technologies watch the traffic, inspect the content of packets or record the time transactions take to complete. Active agents inject synthetic transactions against various application servers on the network to mimic the activity of end users. The active agent captures the end user experience by injecting synthetic transactions rather than measuring end-user response time as it happens.

The ActiveServices Toolbox provides a complete solution for monitoring any web-based business transaction or Windows application. The ActiveServices Toolbox allows for the capture of a user's interactions with any business process, no matter how complex. These "interactions" are recorded and stored as synthetic transaction scripts that can be replayed on-demand, as a scheduled event, or as a diagnostic script on detected faults. Once recorded, the ActiveServices Toolbox will manage the distribution of these scripts to targeted devices and the administration tasks needed to schedule when and why they are run.

Active monitoring provides valuable predictive data on how IT infrastructure will perform by simulating transactions during non-peak periods. If any part of the transaction is delayed based on performance or availability, the script can trigger the OpCenter agent to take a "Snapshot" of the offending device in order to assist in the diagnosis of the problem. When used on-demand, ActiveServices can be used as a testing tool to insure that everything is running correctly after corrective measures have been made. The ActiveServices Toolbox provides a number of detailed reports on the performance of each component of the monitored transaction. These reports can be used to better tune these transactions, or can provide valuable insight on application performance trends over time.

Adding the ActiveServices Toolbox to Operation Center gives you the control you need over the performance and availability of your Windows and web-based applications.