Freshwater Software Keeps a Watchful Eye on Web Services

Looking to provide a bit of control for IT managers responsible for managing Web services, Freshwater Software , a Boulder Colo.-based software provider, today announced what it describes as the first agentless product for monitoring Web services.

Freshwater Software, a subsidiary of Mercury Interactive, says that SiteScope 7.6’s agentless architecture is especially well-suited to monitoring highly distributed systems particularly those found in Web Services infrastructure.

SiteScope offers support for SOAP, Dynamic WSDL invocations and XML Schema complex data types. It can also send alerts to automatically execute a Web Service and a summon diagnostic service when a base Web Service fails, according to Freshwater Software. SiteScope also monitors 65 other infrastructure components and applications.

Diane Hagglund, Freshwater Software’s director of marketing and product management, said that as computing becomes more distributed, agentless monitoring becomes increasingly important. SiteScope’s agentless approach is well-suited to Web Services, which are based on a more fluid, open standards-based architecture, she said.

While Web services represent a great leap in technology, implementing them can equate to sleepless nights for IT managers who have to keep track of software they can’t control. That’s where SiteScope’s capability to measure performance of Web Services against service level requirements comes into play. “If you can’t control it, you better be able to measure it,” said Russell Frahmann, FreshWater’s senior product manager.

Frahmann said that SiteScope is designed to do three things: Measure response times based on set criteria, evaluate the accuracy of data and send an alert or invoke another Web service, if necessary.

SiteScope version 7.6 is available immediately. Pricing starts at $2995 for 25 points, a point being a CPU or a Web service, for example.

SiteSeer, Freshwater’s hosted product, will offer support for Web services monitoring in the first half of 2003, according to Hagglund.