RTView Niches in Middleware Monitoring
RTView offers a middleware monitoring solution. This solution brings much-needed observability to complex technology stacks.
Often when IT professionals talk about monitoring, they’re referring to so-called application performance monitoring (APM) tools. APM tools generally aim to provide end-to-end visibility across the different infrastructure components involved in an application’s transactions.
SL Corporation’s RTView is a different sort of solution, perhaps best described as a platform for multi-vendor middleware monitoring. RTView provides monitoring solutions for products that include messaging apps such as Solace Message Router, Apache Kafka, TIBCO FTL, TIBCO Enterprise Message Service, and for integration apps such as TIBCO BusinessWorks, ActiveSpaces, Oracle WebLogic, and IBM WebSphere.
In contrast to RTView, most traditional APM tools are great at monitoring a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) but cannot get visibility for what’s happening inside the JVM. Such an APM tool could identify that there’s a problem with BusinessWorks, for instance, but not where there is a problem with BusinessWorks (e.g. inside the messaging layer, inside the queues, etc).
Identifying the specific nature of the problem is crucial to resolving incidents that impact the performance and availability of the applications that depend upon these middleware layers. By providing visibility deep into the guts of the middleware layer, RTView helps application support teams and middleware technology support teams reduce mean time to respond to and resolve incidents.
Source: RTView
Our Take
RTView occupies an important niche in the technology marketplace. Many large organizations such as Fortune 1,000 companies have complex, home-grown technology stacks that provide them with a competitive advantage. Often it is the middleware layers such as messaging and integration that enable the various systems to work together across these technology stacks.
With ever-increasing IT complexity, rising competition in the global marketplace, and higher-than-ever expectations for availability and performance from end users, the business, and customers, it’s more important than ever for organizations to have ways to quickly identify and resolve performance and availability issues.
It will be interesting to see whether other software companies try to break into SL’s niche, or whether RTView’s primary competition will continue to be open-source and home-grown middleware monitoring solutions.