Products
FactFinder 3.0 New Features
FactFinder 3.0 delivers a new level of usability for those responsible for managing and supporting important production applications for their firms. Service Delivery Managers, IT Operations and Application Support teams can quickly gain a new perspective on their critical applications by installing FactFinder 3.0 in their environments.
FactFinder uses BlueStripe’s patent-pending AppSmart™ technology to;
- deliver unprecedented visibility into application systems by automatically generating real-time Application System Maps,
- provide live views of application requests across tiers and components, and
- present load curve analysis to know how applications will scale.
These monitoring capabilities provide the facts IT support teams need to analyze production application performance across any application environment.
Key new features in FactFinder 3.0 include:
- Automatic Application System Identification: In 10 minutes, FactFinder, using AppSmart Technology, automatically maps application transaction systems and highlights discrete systems within the IT infrastructure, naming URL sets, hostnames and app pools for monitoring and fast triage. FactFinder delivers system dependency maps, and new real-time Load Curves for proactive capacity planning.
- Application Transaction System Monitoring: Provides a dashboard of multiple applications, including URL-level visibility and hop-by-hop service request response times at every level across application tiers. Alerts have been added to highlight potential problem areas and to quickly isolate problem components.
- Enterprise Fleet Scaling: Scales to thousands of servers across physical, virtual and cloud platforms, and drills down into individual application systems of up to 250 servers for complete visibility of response times and component usage across an enterprise. Federates multiple FactFinder deployments for problem solving collaboration.
Collectors
BlueStripe Collectors discover application processes, gather data on process-level connections, and deliver health and performance metrics for both the application components and underlying system resources on any given machine, virtual or physical. Collectors report this information to the FactFinder Console, which uses the performance data and information from AppSmart technology to understand where application requests go and where requests spend their time.
Console
The FactFinder Console provides an intuitive user interface to gather, analyze, and store your application performance and structural data. The console automatically discovers BlueStripe Collectors in its local subnet. In addition, with a few simple clicks you can discover specific Collectors by IP or hostname, or discover multiple Collectors located in ranges of IP addresses or other sub-nets.
Major UI components in the Console include:
- App Center: The home base for monitoring and managing applications, the App Center includes the App List, the System Map, Top Performance Contributors, an Events Pane, and a Map Focus pane.
- Monitoring / Management tabs: From complete applications to machine views and process views, each individual tab provides a focused window into your application systems that is independent of other open tabs.
- Events Pane Menu: Everything that can be done with double clicks can be done with menu commands, too.
Collectors Discovery
FactFinder automatically discovers any BlueStripe Collectors in its local subnet. In addition, with a few simple clicks you can discover specific Collectors by IP or hostname, or discover multiple Collectors located in ranges of IP addresses or other subnets.
FactFinder will automatically connect to as many Collectors as permitted by your license. A simple dialog box allows you to activate and deactivate connections to specific discovered Collectors, enabling you to focus on a specific subset of applications in your environment. The selection is dynamic and immediate (with no reboot required).
App Center
App List / Machine List
The App List, located in the upper left corner of the FactFinder App Center tab, contains all the applications that FactFinder has discovered within your environment. EachApp List entry includes a meaningful application name (i.e., Apache HTTP Server: CustomerPortal), and miniature real-time application performance metrics, indicating live response times and application load metrics.
Select an application in the list (single click) and watch the system map. FactFinder highlights every machine, node, process, component, connection, etc. that make up the selected application. You can directly focus in on a specific component in the highlighted area, or open the application in a new App Explorer Tab (see below).
From inside the App List, right-click (context) menus contain key "quick actions" that you can take on any specific application such as:
- Saving a Snapshot
- Setting an Alert
- Examining the Application Properties
- Generating Reports
- and more…
If you double click an application in the list, you will open a new App Explorer tab within the FactFinder console with the specific application loaded into the workbench area. From there, you can examine all the components of that single application without other machines or processes getting in the way.
System Map
The System Map delivers a visualization of your entire application system structure, including all machine-to-machine connections discovered by BlueStripe Collectors deployed in your environment. Using the System Map, you can quickly get a sense for the complexity of your environment, and immediately identify performance issues using the filters located above the map in the App Center tab.
The System Map also supports historical mode, enabling you to move back in time and investigate historical data for your entire application system infrastructure.
Top 10s
Across the top of the App Center is a set of tabs, each tab displaying a set of graphs of the “worst offenders” for certain metrics, such as average response time, average user load, and more. When you select an app from the “Top 10” list, all the components of the specific application is highlighted within the system map (the same as if you selected an application from the App List).
Events Pane
In the lower left corner of the App Center is the Events pane, which contains a list of all alerts that have kicked from your applications.
All Items Button / Search
With a single click, the All Items button brings up a list of all connected systems, grouped appropriately. You can quickly find URL groups (such as all URLs with “customer service” in the name), specific machines within an IP address range or domain, or all instances of a specific application process (such as Oracle). When you type text into the Search panel, FactFinder automatically shows all instances within the “All Items” list that match the text.
App Explorer
The App Explorer tab is a specialized workbench in FactFinder that allows you to examine a single application with no “noise” from other machines in the application system getting in the way.
You open a new App Explorer tab by double clicking any application in the App List. The new App Explorer tab will show only components from the selected application on the screen, complete with all the individual processes – and their interdependencies / connections.
You can see both live and historical data for the application in the App Explorer. Click on the History button and select an available time range.
If you want to create a quick synopsis of the Application (with either live or historical data), take a Snapshot (from the top menu, select File, Save a Snapshot.Hot tip: A fast, easy way to compare an application’s performance over two different times (including live data) is the FactFinder Comparison Report.
There is a quick way to run a comparison report using the “Duplicate Tab” feature of FactFinder.
1.Create a 2nd App Explorer Tab with the same App (either by duplicating the tab or going back to the App Center Tab and double-clicking the App to open a new App Explorer Tab)
2.In each App Explorer Tab for the specific application, set the time range you want for comparison
3.From inside either App Explorer Tab (it doesn’t matter which one), go to the top menu, select Reports, Comparison
4.Using the slider at the bottom of the dialog, select threshold you want for reporting change across the two time ranges (e.g. only show things that changed by more than 20%)
5.In the dialog, select the other open App Explorer Tab with your application.
6.The comparison report generates dynamically. You now have a powerful report that succinctly shows you the difference between the application at two points in time
Across Then Down
By following the service requests, you can isolate the specific component(s) causing application slow-downs. Start at the edge of the slow application (where requests from end users enter the application system) and follow the service request response times, from silo to silo, across the application structure. Even if you know nothing about the application architecture, you will be able to track down the specific machine creating the slow-down.
Hover your mouse on top of specific machines, connections, or processes. FactFinder will create small pop-up graphs of metrics for that specific entity. You can select a graph from the pop-up with a single click to see more details designed to help you follow the service request response times to the specific machine that is slowing down the application.
Once the response time problem has been isolated to a single machine, you double click the machine to drill-down, seeing the process-level data that help determine the specific process / component causing the slow response time.
Load Curves
FactFinder Load Curves detail what the specific throughput data for specific application components are right now (as opposed to an hour ago, last night, last week, etc.) Load Curve analysis and displays, unique to FactFinder, help you anticipate and avoid throughput issues; and perform capacity planning.
Snapshot
Snapshot enables FactFinder users to create instant synopses about specific applications to communicate specifics about the application to others in their organization.
Reports
Triage Report
Quickly and easily document your investigative findings with the new FactFinder Triage Report, the latest addition to FactFinder’s rich reporting capabilities. Once you have identified a problematic node and/or process in the application you can easily document your findings to facilitate the assignment of the problem to the appropriate level 3 resource for resolution.
The Triage Report focuses on the performance and configuration data relevant to your specific application issue, enabling you to clearly present the facts of what is causing an application problem.
Comparison Report
The easiest way to compare application performance to a “golden” benchmark is to use the FactFinder Comparison Report. This report compares any two of the following items:
- Live data (in App Explorer)
- Historical Data (in App Explorer)
- Snapshot
- Another App Explorer Tab
The report includes not only standard analyses, but also includes a list of all items and attributes that have changed by a user-specified amount (10%, 20%, etc.)
Hop-by-Hop Visibility
FactFinder not only discovers all connections between application components across the infrastructure, but also measures all service requests between any two components and/or processes. This hop-by-hop visibility enables FactFinder to map, display, and measure performance across all the service requests. This is the only way to accurately measure application service performance, or find bottlenecks in complex applications.
Proactive Monitoring
FactFinder includes the widest coverage for alerts, monitoring machines, processes, components, connections, and more. When a problem occurs, FactFinder can alert support teams so they can find and fix the issue before end users are impacted.
