eG News

It's been years since I last had the opportunity to speak with representatives of eG Innovations about their eG Enterprise performance monitoring technology. When I last had an opportunity to see what the company was doing, it had the ability to monitor performance from the point of view of the end users; individual application components; and applications, as well as providing a detailed view of what's happening and where. Since then, eG Enterprise 6.1 has taken the company's capabilities a bit further, into the realm of virtual worlds.

Here's what the company says about eG Enterprise 6.1:

The release of eG Enterprise 6.1 adds a list of new Citrix-focused features and enhancements, including:

• 100% Citrix 7.x-Ready: Built-in best practices for monitoring Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop 7.x
• Citrix User Experience Monitoring: Including application launch tracking, logon monitoring, and network latency reporting
• Expanded GPU monitoring for hypervisors and virtual desktops
• Integration with Citrix NetScaler Insight for enhanced network performance visibility
• Pre-Built reports for VM capacity planning, migration performance analysis, Citrix printing analysis and user logon performance analysis

The company had previously announced technology to work closely with VMware's virtual computing environments.

Dan's Take: Instrumenting Virtual Environments Can Be Challenging 

As I've pointed out in the past, there are many suppliers focused on performance monitoring and management. Today's applications are often a complex mix of distributed, multi-tier services and components that have been harnessed together to perform a specific set of functions. Each layer has its own monitoring challenges, and getting the whole picture can be difficult.

If we consider the approaches to monitoring performance, each of the vendors is looking at different aspects of this complex stack of software and hardware. As I've mentioned in the past, some focus on the end user's experience. Some focus on database, application or system performance. Some focus on the performance of the network itself.

Furthermore, the vendors' approaches are different. Some ask customers to embed hardware or software agents throughout the IT infrastructure. Others "sniff" the network and learn who is talking to whom. Still others connect to the management interfaces of all of the operating systems, application components, applications, databases, networking and storage equipment. In the end, the goal is usually the same.

Every vendor would point out that performance problems can lead directly to both lost customers and lost revenue. eG Innovations has often pointed out that when time is money, it's important to be able to quickly see what's happening and where, and be able to either prevent problems from occurring or quickly address them.

The company has long been able to monitor end-to-end connectivity and dive deeply into the services that make up today's distributed applications. What's new this time is the ability to work with Citrix and VMware to monitor minute details of what's happening in virtual environments that use access, application, processing, storage and network virtualization.

eG and the Competition I hear good things about the company and its products when speaking with customers. That's a good place to start. eG Innovations isn't as well known as some of its larger competitors, such as BMC, CA, Dell, HPE, IBM and Microsoft. And each of those competitors, of course, would be likely to say that their tools make it easy to monitor their own computing environments.

There are many smaller competitors working on addressing the same issues. Most are pushing "big data" and "predictive analytics" as part of their claim of superiority. To win, eG Innovations has to be able to address these counter claims and do them one better, in both overall product capability and ease of use. I'd suggest taking the time to read through the company's success stories and seeing a demonstration. After seeing what eG can do, enterprises might be swayed to think that the company can support the claim that they're offering monitoring that is deeper, broader, faster and more intelligent than the rest.

About the Author

Daniel Kusnetzky, a reformed software engineer and product manager, founded Kusnetzky Group LLC in 2006. He's literally written the book on virtualization and often comments on cloud computing, mobility and systems software. He has been a business unit manager at a hardware company and head of corporate marketing and strategy at a software company. In his spare time, he's also the managing partner of Lux Sonus LLC, an investment firm.