Sentinel

Technical Benefits

Realistic Simulation of User Transactions

Unlike most so-called application monitoring solutions, Sentinel does not simply exercise a home or search page every few minutes.

Sentinel simulates the whole business transaction realistically, varying data if required, looping as a user would do so, and of course validating all application responses.

Therefore the information displayed in the Sentinel GUI is a realistic representation of what your users will be experiencing and can be used to make technical and business decisions with confidence.

Performance and System Data on One Screen

It is common to have two, three or more applications all related to performance monitoring. When one alerts, the others need to be checked and the process of firstly confirming if there is a problem, secondly identifying who is receiving the problem, and lastly the cause of the problem can be very time consuming.

Sentinel displays all the information on which user communities are experiencing the problem, the nature of the problem, and the underlying system resources in one easy to use GUI - therefore the time to validate there is a problem, understand the coverage and identify the reason is the time it takes to inspect the Sentinel GUI - seconds!

Monitor Whatever Resources You Need

As well as correctly simulating the transactions the users of the application will perform, Sentinel can also monitor any aspect of the underlying systems - operating system metrics, network utilisation and problems, web server statistics, application infrastructure software (J2EE, .Net, etc.) metrics and database internals - in fact with out extensible Resource Monitoring, anything required can be monitored.

Such wide ranging and detailed monitoring facilitates speedy diagnosis if and when a performance problem occurs.

Different Locations and Connection Speeds

Sentinel Agents can be placed in as many locations as you like, and be configured to run as if they are executing on different speed networks.

Place Agents in your data centre, ISP and on the Internet to allow you to identify where in your infrastructure problems are occurring. Or one in each office to understand which office personnel are affected when a problem occurs.

In fact, Sentinel can be installed wherever, with whatever configuration, is appropriate for your business.

Customised Alerting - No Flooding

The Sentinel Alerting Facility can be configured to raise an alert exactly to your specifications – after all, what is important for one organisation may be insignificant to another.

Alerts can also be configured to be sent to different destinations, using different transports, depending on the time of day, day or week or day of year.

Total customisation, plus the ability to configure when alert floods should stop, means you can immediately notify the relevant person when a problem in which they are interested is detected.