Identify Software announced the release of AppSight J2EE 6.0 at the JavaOne Conference in San Francisco. This is, the latest version of the company's comprehensive solution for J2EE application problem resolution. AppSight automates and accelerates the tasks of application problem resolution - one of the most time-consuming and costly processes of application lifecycle management. Currently shipping, AppSight J2EE 6.0 is the first application management solution with the capability to rapidly pinpoint the root cause of configuration problems, which industry research indicates are the root cause of 40-50 percent of all application problems.

Change is a constant of application lifecycle management, as organizations continually adopt new technologies and implement new business processes to remain competitive. "Businesses today depend upon underpinning applications for the delivery of key products and services. Yet, applications do not exist by themselves, as they are actually part of an inter-dependent application 'stack' of IT infrastructure resources where each layer of the stack potentially adds numerous potential points of failure. Companies need to consider the deployment of tools and processes to help them quickly isolate and resolve application problems or otherwise face the prospect of encountering significant business risk," said Cameron Haight, research vice president, Gartner, Inc.

For most organizations, problem resolution remains an iterative, manual, error-prone, communications-intensive activity that involves multiple members of application development, application support, and IT operations. AppSight automates the entire process, leveraging patented Black Box software to monitor application execution and capture a synchronized, real-time log of user actions, system events, performance metrics, configuration data, and code execution flow - much like the "black box" flight recorder on an aircraft captures a real-time record of a flight. By capturing actual problem history in a centralized repository, AppSight eliminates the need to recreate the problem and provides the basis for team collaboration and communication. AppSight is integrated with leading systems management and service management applications to provide rapid access to specific problem history for the entire problem resolution team, and has been proven to accelerate problem resolution by up to 70percent.

Often an application runs without problems on one J2EE application server, but displays strange or inconsistent behavior on another. AppSight J2EE 6.0 introduces the ability to compare the configurations of two seemingly identical servers to highlight hidden application configuration differences that may be the cause of an application problem. Problems that AppSight's Configuration Compare capabilities will quickly pinpoint include: problems caused by incorrect version of application components, inadequate server resources (JDBC, Threads, Memory), inappropriate server parameters (class path, JVM), and much more.

Sometimes a problem is isolated to a single application user. AppSight uniquely captures both application execution and configuration data on the server and on the client-side, and allows the problem triage team to "follow in the footsteps" of an individual transaction in a heterogeneous environment - from a Windows/.NET client, to the Web server, and into tiered J2EE and .NET application servers.

AppSight's role-based views allow each member of the problem triage team to view the specific dimension of the application stack for which he's responsible. IT operations and application support teams can view configuration information and system-level information (such as network and database operations). This enables IT operations and application support teams that do not have a deep understanding of application code - but, do have responsibility for the application environment - to effectively isolate and resolve problems that are a result of the IT infrastructure stack or the application configuration, and avoid needless escalation to the development organization. When true application issues are escalated to application development, the app dev team can view code-level execution (with full parameters, variable, and data details) to quickly pinpoint the root cause, without having to recreate the problem in the development environment.

"Effective application management is becoming increasingly difficult as mainstream business processes are enabled by increasingly complex, J2EE and .NET applications," said Yochi Slonim, president and CEO, Identify Software. "AppSight delivers a vital dimension of application insight and process automation that enables the entire IT organization to effectively and efficiently deploy and manage applications as well as increase application availability and performance, while reducing support costs."