Application integration in a cloudy world is an important and often forgotten area that I am predicting will see significant movement in the months ahead. One of the long standing providers in the field who still remains independent (after Dell’s purchase of Boomi and IBM’s purchase of CastIron) is SnapLogic (more on them here) who is today announcing performance monitoring as an additional service alongside its cloud integration portfolio. The real time data and workflow monitoring offering gives users of SnapLogic’s application integration service real time insight into the health of their integrations – performance metrics and system tuning and the like.
The tools SnapLogic is rolling out include;
- Real-Time Data Flow Analysis: A new view shows comprehensive performance metrics, including CPU utilization, wait time, records in and out, throughput and more. Users simply mouse over any part of an integration workflow to identify bottlenecks impeding the flow or processing of data.
- Enhanced Debugging: Users can now follow data flowing through an integration workflow. For example, individual records of data are now viewable before and after they pass through filters and joins, allowing immediate debugging.
- Auto Suggest for Salesforce Object Query Language (SOQL): SnapLogic’s Smart Query Builder for SOQL introspects Salesforce schemas and instantly provides suggestions on schema objects as users type in SOQL queries
In explaining the move, Ash Jhaveri, Vice President of Product Management at SnapLogic said that;
The modern enterprise has data everywhere. It lives in legacy ESBs, custom applications, on-premise packaged apps, cloud services and Hadoop. SnapLogic’s customers understand that to remain competitive their applications need to share data. The challenge created by myriad apps sharing data in diverse formats is gaining an understanding of where data is flowing in real-time within the system. With an understanding of data flow, customers can quickly identify and remove bottlenecks.
MyPOV
I like the approach of both providing an integration play and giving enterprises insights into how that data stream is working – it is a reflection of the fact that moving forwards organizations need to move discrete parts of application lifecycle out of the silos they currently live in. I’ve always liked integration plays and spend a lot of time thinking about what they would look like bought down the food chain to small and mid sized businesses. In terms of adding monitoring to integration, the jury is still out on exactly which integrations will sit most comfortably together in some kind of quasi-suite – and until we all know that there will continue to be a lot of frothiness with M&A activity and vendors rolling out extra services that sit aside their core offerings.
