Bristol's eSleuth tracks transaction performance

by Geneva Sapp

December 27, 2000 —

WITH ITS RELEASE this week of eSleuth, which is designed to analyze bottlenecks and system failures in applications based on IBM MQSeries middleware, Bristol Technology targeted the growing complexity of application integration.

According to Ken Blackwell, CTO of Bristol, most analysis programs simply point out when a problem occurred and alert the company to it, whereas eSleuth helps define why and where the problem occurred.

Blackwell said that "eSleuth is about helping organizations analyze and diagnose performance or logic problems in distributed transaction systems."

Thomas Murphy, program director at Meta Group, a Stamford, Conn.-based business-analysis company, commented that the ability to analyze transactions is fundamental to the health of any e-business.

"Any glitch in these applications represents millions of dollars that can be lost in overall revenue in a very short time. You really can't afford to fail," Murphy said.

The Bristol offering's capability of pinpointing why and where the problem occurred gives programmers powerful tools in problem resolution, according to Murphy.

"Knowing where the problem is is 90 percent of the solution," Murphy said.

Competitor Rational Software offers more breadth and a more integrated suite of products than does Bristol, Murphy said, but in terms of Web site-and system-testing capabilities, Bristol offers greater depth. Another competitor, Mercury, is currently developing a best-of-breed testing solution that complements Bristol's technology, Murphy said.

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