Tidal Software Announces New Application Performance Management Solution for PeopleSoft

Tidal Software(TM), a leading provider of application scheduling and performance management software, today announced that its newest release of Tidal(TM) Horizon 1.8, a proven solution for application performance automation, now delivers service level monitoring and automated performance analysis for the PeopleSoft Enterprise applications. This product, which is now in general availability for PeopleSoft customers, delivers the same automated, low-overhead performance management for PeopleSoft that it has previously delivered for customers of other ERP applications.

The new edition, Tidal Horizon for PeopleSoft, can diagnose the root cause of over fifty common service level issues impacting the performance of PeopleSoft. Through its workflow-based approach, Tidal Horizon proactively identifies the specific source of performance problems that can ultimately result in service disruptions. These include a range of conditions across the end to end infrastructure of the application from a specific SQL statement to a slow component on the application server to a performance problem on the web server. This specificity reduces the time to localize, diagnose, and ultimately repair a problem -- viewed as the mean time to repair -- often enabling IT to address service level issues before being reported by an end user and often on the first occurrence of the problem.

"Tidal continues to expand the coverage of our new approach to application performance management, allowing enterprises to standardize data center operations for improved service delivery, better utilization of human capital, and greater visibility into the end-to-end operation of the business process," said Rod Butters, senior vice president of worldwide marketing for Tidal Software.

For current customers who use Tidal(TM) Enterprise Scheduler to manage the data center operation of PeopleSoft, Tidal Horizon for PeopleSoft offers new opportunities for service optimization and real time response to business needs through the use of the integration of Tidal's enterprise job scheduling and application performance management solutions. This integration, called Tidal(TM) ASAP, brings performance management data directly into the automation of IT processes. The result is a complete solution for automation of the operational, diagnostic, and corrective action processes needed to run PeopleSoft applications.

Application Performance Automation

Most application monitoring products only collect, correlate, and then passively alert when a metric or transaction exceeds a service threshold. With its integrated event correlation and workflow engine, Horizon adds a new level of automation to the often manual process of uncovering the real root cause to performance problems in critical business applications. When Horizon detects an event or message from the application indicating the possible presence of a service level issue, Horizon automatically starts executing a workflow. This workflow models the sequence of actions a team of application performance experts would take to uncover the root of a problem. Horizon for PeopleSoft ships with workflows that model the diagnostic process for over fifty commonly occurring service level problems, continually analyzing the production system for indications of any of these. In many cases, the analysis and corresponding diagnostic alert will be reported before users experience a service level issue or other background processing is impacted.

Tidal Horizon also offers the option for workflow creation and customization. With the easy-to-use drag and drop interface, Horizon allows users to create custom workflows that capture additional best practices for a specific environment and run them automatically 24x7x365. Through workflows, users have a logical, consistent, reproducible approach to monitoring important systems and lowering costs by reducing the time it takes to resolve a problem by up to 90%.

Diagnostic Reporting

As the Horizon workflow executes, it captures and stores data relevant to the situation it is investigating. Horizon then creates a web-enabled diagnostic report describing the problem. Oftentimes metrics pertinent to a performance problem are only available when the problem is actually happening. Horizon captures this relevant information at the time, creating an easily accessible historical record of the specific situation. These comprehensive diagnostic reports not only provide detailed insight into the root cause of the problem, but eliminate the extensive after-the-fact review of system logs associated with traditional performance monitoring and facilitate collaboration across all the functional groups in a PeopleSoft environment such as application developers, database administrators, and network administrators.

Tidal's solution directly connects to PeopleSoft Performance Monitor, capturing detailed metrics of PeopleSoft operation across all tiers of the PeopleSoft Internet Architecture. There is no need to install additional agents, maintaining low overhead and simplifying deployment and future upgrades to the solution.