Application Diagnostics

No matter what precautions you take in your attempts to achieve 100% reliability and availability of your applications, system glitches are a fact of life. It’s important to remember that users of the system rarely know that their application experience was disrupted by a specific error or issue. All they see is a failed order or a lost shipment, which they’ll likely report. It then becomes IT's task to diagnose the failure or loss of a transaction and repair the system as soon as possible.

The problem is as challenging as finding the provervial needle in a haystack. Armed with only anecdotal information—such as such as user ID, a part number, or a time interval—IT is often called on to determine what went wrong at a technical level. What usually follows is a resource-intensive fire-drill that may involve acrimonious finger-pointing across teams.

To address these issues, AmberPoint Management System includes the Transaction Safety Net™, a set of tools that help your application teams put the pieces together quickly. With the Transaction Safety Net, users can quickly search for transactions matching the information reported by a user, narrow down the suspects and identify problem transactions. Furthermore, they have the entire context available at their disposal to identify the problem-causing message and related service and to reproduce the problem.

Amberpoint provides unprecedented visibility into application behavior and drastically reduces the mean-time-to-repair for critical business transactions.

AmberPoint Capabilities

Active Transaction Recording
Policy-based archiving of every single transaction flowing through an application:

• Customize logging parameters for each transaction type as well as individual services
• Log data to third-party log analysis, business intelligence or archiving systems
• Sanitize sensitive data elements before logging to address privacy and compliance issues

Transaction Search Engine
Context-sensitive search capabilities for finding suspect transactions:

• Aggregation, assembly and display of transaction messages across a distributed application environment
• Free-text and regular expression search across messages to look for exception symptoms
• Drill down from messages to downstream or upstream messages to understand root cause
• Direct access to symptomatic messages in a transaction to ease collaboration between customer support, IT and development

Transaction Visibility Toolkit
AmberPoint's Transaction Visibility Toolkit is a platform-neutral protocol and SDK that enables organizations to extend the reach of AmberPoint's transaction tracking capabilities to custom applications and infrastructure.

• Extends AmberPoint to home-grown applications, legacy systems and vertical solutions
• Enables visibility across appliances, middleware, machine-controlled environments, etc.
• Available to AmberPoint SI and ISV partners