Panacya updates system analysis tool

May 24, 2004 —

Panacya Inc.'s flagship product for analyzing system performance has been upgraded with an improved ability to share data among its analytics modules, more pre-packaged modules and easier methods to create or modify modules.

The product, until now called BusinessAware, has been rebaptized as Panacya Service Center for this upgrade, which is version 2.4, the company announced Monday.

Panacya Service Center collects performance data from system elements such as operating systems, applications, databases, and networks, analyzes the data and presents it, said Brian Murphy, Panacya's vice president of sales and marketing. The product lets IT staffers identify problem areas, fine-tune systems, anticipate complications and improve overall performance, he said.

Panacya Service Center 2.4's new features include:

-- the ability to share data among analytics modules for custom analysis;

-- an improved and enhanced set of analytics modules;

-- a simplified process to create or modify modules that lets users automate most recurring configuration actions;

-- and support for Mbeans, allowing for the collection of enterprise data from Java objects representing a manageable resource, such as an application, a component or a device.

Financial services company Strong Financial Corp. had been using a system-monitoring tool that was complicated and expensive to manage, maintain and customize, and last year replaced it with version 2.3 of the Panacya product, which is much simpler to use, said Ritch Houdek, Strong Financial's IT infrastructure manager.

It's very easy to modify and create Panacya analytics modules, and its interface is very intuitive and user-friendly, making it possible for a wide variety of IT staffers, such as database and server administrators, to pull data from it, Houdek said. The previous product, which he declined to mention, was complicated and only one or two designated staffers were able to interact with it, creating a bottleneck of information requests, he said.

"For the previous product, we needed a central administration point. To add something, you had to go through the manager we had for it. Panacya is more like a self-service model. You don't need experts to keep it going and operate it," he said.

Strong Financial wants now to extend access to the Panacya data to application developers so they have a better view of how their applications are performing, Houdek said.

Houdek also calls the Panacya product "smart software," because it learns what the normal operation of Strong Financial's systems are and reacts and triggers alerts accordingly, whereas the previous product didn't have such an advanced capacity to learn, he said.

As Panacya continues to enhance the product in future upgrades, Houdek would like the company to focus on extending this intelligence, so that the product automatically understands all the components touching, for example, the company's stock trading system and automatically analyzes how each component is affecting the performance of that system, he said.

Right now, Strong Financial has to manually map and build the hierarchies of components that as a group interact to serve up an application, a complicated and time-consuming process, he said. "The big breakthrough would be in auto-discovering these groups and building these application models automatically," he said.

Houdek has had a chance to test drive version 2.4 and is very encouraged by the improvements in it. Panacya has made it even easier to use, especially the process for tweaking and customizing analytics modules, he said.

Panacya Service Center is available now. Its base server costs US$50,000, and each analytics module deployed costs $1,000, Murphy said. Volume discounts are available.

IDG News Service