Dot, the real-time software specialist, today brings its new Dot Metrics to the market, combining in a single software system a valuable, proven development tool and a powerful monitoring resource.
DOT METRICS is specifically designed to support both development and production, alongside ITRS's Geneos and other system-wide monitoring technology.
Highlighting its versatility, even during the development process, DOT METRICS has since been successfully integrated into the trading room infrastructures of three different types of City firm: one of Mayfair's largest alternative investment management businesses, a leading Spread Betting / CFD trader, and a major European bank.
The product is now released and available for evaluation.
LESLIE SPIRO, who co-founded DOT in the mid-1990s, is a pioneer of real-time trading systems and co-founder of EasyScreen. He is pleased with the timing of DOT Metrics' entrance to the market.
"This is a good moment to launch DOT Metrics." he explains, "Larger organisations already have the ability to monitor their applications „from the outside‟ and detect crashes. DOT Metrics provides a simple way for them to also monitor an application‟s „internals‟. Smaller companies and development/test groups can use DOT‟s monitoring tools to discover what applications are running, where they‟re running and how efficiently they‟re functioning."
TWIN ROLE: HOW DOT METRICS WORKS
Most development groups are already doing something to monitor their applications during development: DOT Metrics offers a 'better' way to do this. It supports the usual suspects (log files, JMX beans and WMI counters) while adding a neat GUI and support for broadcasting metrics over a range of transports.
But the biggest benefits are felt when applications built with DOT Metrics get released into production. As developers add metrics during the design and build stages, a rich source of useful data is created, any subset of which can be published to the production monitoring system simply by changing a configuration file.
This richer metrics data is then available for monitoring in production, which strengthens Operations' ability to spot problems before they occur - perhaps queues lengthening or latency increasing - and to diagnose production incidents promptly. For smaller organisations, without a Systems Monitoring Platform in place, DOT Metrics provides a simple and effective monitoring and alerting system to improve support of production systems.
As Leslie Spiro tells it - "We‟re all familiar with banks working in product silos, but the "Two Tribes" arrangement within a silo - Development and Operations - can be very inefficient. Developers create and work with one set of information and then the Ops staff who inherit the finished version have to start all over again looking for metrics to use.
"DOT Metrics makes that repetition a thing of the past: it encourages horizontal thinking by providing a way for the Ops staff to review the metrics used during development, when it‟s easy to add or change them. And in production, should problems occur, DOT Metrics gives troubleshooting developers faster access to the detailed information they need."