Aternity Cartridges

The Aternity frontline performance intelligence platform is architected to support the broad range of application architectures that exist within today's enterprises.

Aternity monitors the frontline user experience for an application by passively listening for application activity signatures at the operating system level. Since different application architectures require listening for different operating system level signatures, Aternity has created unique plug-ins, called cartridges, for a range of application architectures. Each cartridge captures user-defined business activities, such as "logon", "order item" or "add new customer", for the specific application architecture. Aternity currently offers cartridges for Outlook, server-based computing (including Citrix and Microsoft Terminal Server RDP) and web applications (including HTTP and HTTPS). Aternity is currently developing cartridges for Protocol Agnostic Monitoring, client/server applications (Win32 Windowing API) and Oracle E-Business Suite (Swing).

Outlook Cartridge

Aternity's Outlook cartridge provides out-of-the-box support for the Microsoft Outlook Client, including XP, 2003 and 2007. By listening for key business activities through hooking of the underlying COM interfaces, this cartridge automatically monitors Outlook activity without requiring any configuration. A simple selection to turn on monitoring for Outlook enables enterprise-wide collection of performance metrics activities including "Send", "Post to public folder" and "Connect to Exchange".

The specific measurements for each of the Outlook cartridge activities include:

  • Response time
  • Latency

Each activity measurement also includes the target Exchange server of the request, facilitating affected server triage analytics.

Server-Based ComputingCitrix

ICA (Desktop and Server) Cartridge
The Citrix cartridge provides support for Citrix-hosted applications. The cartridge allows Aternity Agents to utilize any other Aternity cartridge to monitor end user experiences on Citrix presentation servers while simultaneously monitoring the ICA protocol latency from end user workstations. The cartridge utilizes ICA to capture latency data between the end user workstations and Presentation Server while capturing all other applicative metrics at the Presentation Server. This architecture allows the Aternity Platform to differentiate and identify whether performance problems are workstation, front-end network, Presentation Server, back-end network or application related.

Supported Citrix environments include:

  • Windows versions
    • Windows 2000 Advanced Server
    • Windows 2003 Advanced Server
  • Citrix Presentation Server version
    • Citrix Presentation Server 4.0
    • Citrix MetaFrame 1.8


Aternity Citrix Solution

Microsoft Terminal Server RDP (Desktop and Server) Cartridge
The Aternity Microsoft Terminal Server RDP cartridge provides support for RDP-hosted applications. The cartridge allows Aternity Agents to utilize any other Aternity cartridge to monitor end user experience on the RDP Server while simultaneously monitoring performance from end user workstations. The cartridge utilizes RDP to capture latency and jitter between end user workstations and presentation servers. All other metrics are captured at the presentation server. This architecture allows the Aternity Platform to pinpoint whether performance problems are workstation, network, remote desktop server or application related.

Supported RDP environments include:

  • RDP Windows versions
    • Windows 2000 Advanced Server
    • Windows 2003 Advanced Server
  • Remote Desktop Connection client versions:
    • Remote Desktop Connection Shell Version 5.1.2600.2180, Control Version
    • Remote Desktop Connection Shell Version 6.0.6000, Control Version 6.0.6000

Web Applications Cartridge

The Web Applications cartridge supports browser-based applications communicating over HTTP and HTTPS. By hooking the combination of Win32 API, Winsock and the WinInet APIs, the cartridge passively captures both secure and non-secure web sessions. Custom and common web applications such as PeopleSoft, Siebel and SAP NetWeaver can be monitored with the Web Applications cartridge. Business activities may be configured for single web requests or for a user-defined set of requests that comprise a single logical business activity. End user "think time" in between requests is automatically filtered out, providing an accurate measurement of application response.

The specific measurements for the Web Applications cartridge include:

  • Response time
  • Availability
  • Latency
  • Throughput
  • End-to-end execution time

The Web Applications cartridge does not require secure key management or the secret keys themselves to facilitate the measurement of HTTPS-based web applications.

Client/Server Cartridge

The Client/Server cartridge supports legacy and proprietary applications where the protocol isn't known, is encrypted or where the user interface represents the best approach to define and capture business activities. The Client/Server cartridge operates through hooking the Win32 message loop processing code to calculate and determine the performance of any Windows application, ranging from packaged applications such as Microsoft Office through custom applications written in Visual Basic, the .NET framework and the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC).

Activity criteria include a variety of options, including the title of the window, a click of a button or a key press and can report latency and end-to-end execution metrics. Measurements include the performance metrics but can also include additional client-side application data, such as the window title or the text in a given field at the time of measurement. This allows for the Aternity solution to perform advanced grouping and problem correlation.

The specific measurements for the Client/Server cartridge include:

  • Response time
  • Latency
  • Throughput
  • End-to-end execution time

Oracle E-Business Suite Cartridge

The Oracle E-Business Suite cartridge supports applications deployed as part of Oracle 11i and Release 12. It is based on the Java cartridge and includes pre-configured templates specific to the way E-Business Suite takes advantage of the Java UI libraries. It includes support for both JInitiator-based deployments as well as the standard Java JRE, as supported by Oracle. The E-Business Suite cartridge will support measuring user experience of Oracle Forms without requiring any additional configuration.

The specific measurements for the Oracle E-Business Suite cartridge include:

  • Latency
  • Response time
  • End-to-end execution time
 
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