Quest Software this week released Quest's Performance Management Suite for Java and Portals. While Domino users are still in the early stages of ramping up with WebSphere, it probably isn't too early to keep an eye on such J2EE performance management products, especially as they relate to portals.
End-user response times can cause issues in WebSphere environments, particularly as the number of users calling on portals rises. Among issues developers and admins encounter is the case where too many users may call on the same content at the same time; meanwhile, portlets waiting for availability of session objects can cause bottlenecks, as WebSphere expert Tony Higham pointed out on this site in his article "Best practices for WebSphere portlet development" earlier this year.
Best practices and inexpensive monitoring facilities certainly have their merit. Enterprise tool suites that embed best practices have merit too, at least in larger settings. Big Domino operations, as they move to Workplace and WebSphere portal schemes, may find performance issues that are not easy to pinpoint. Besides portal activity monitoring, tools such as Quest's watch servlets, JMS and JDBC services, threads and queues and Enterprise JavaBean (EJB)caching.
The Quest suite provides a cross-enterprise analysis dashboard which in turn provides a view of Java applications, application servers, portals, Web servers, the end-user experience and databases. "Out-of-memory" error reports help IT track the cause of problems.
Such tooling is not inexpensive. Quest's Performance Management Suite for Java and Portals starts at $12,000. Besides Quest, players in this WebSphere performance add-on field include Wily Technologies, Veritas, and others.
Related
Quest performance document library – Quest site