Most people in the TIBCO community have heard of RTView by now. TIBCO resells a subset of the RTView product line to complement its EMS and BW products. But most users are not aware of the extent to which the RTView provides a comprehensive solution to many of the biggest monitoring challenges facing organizations today. Those who haven’t seen RTView in a few years are usually very surprised at how far it has come.
RTView is NOT just a tool for building dashboards – It started out that way back in 2003. And yes, in the hands of smart, creative programmers, the power tools that RTView provides can be used to develop incredibly detailed custom views of the real-time health state of complex (and often TIBCO-centric) applications. Users love the power and flexibility it offers.
But RTView has evolved way beyond that. It didn’t take long for SL to realize there were a lot of smart, creative, people out there who had other important things to do, and simply didn’t have time to figure out what data they needed to query to build their own dashboards. They wanted us to provide them already built… so we did. Several years ago, SL introduced the RTView TIBCO EMS Monitor and BusinessWorks Monitor products to provide out-of-the-box, in-depth monitoring, data archival, dashboards, and built-in alerting for these technologies. Essentially, you just drop these in and everything you need to monitor these technologies is at your fingertips.
Soon afterwards it became clear that users had a great need for an even broader monitoring solution that would provide a consolidated end-to-end view of application health state across these TIBCO technologies, as well as technologies provided by other vendors such as Oracle WebLogic and Coherence, or Tomcat servers and JVMs, for example. This resulted in major advances in the RTView suite of products culminating in the comprehensive Enterprise Monitor platform with its multi-vendor technology Solution Packages.
RTView is a complete, full-featured monitoring and control system for complex heterogeneous applications – The buzzword these days is “Operational Intelligence”. In the case of RTView, this means real-time monitoring of application and infrastructure metrics across multiple technologies, data correlation and analysis to detect abnormal situations, and dashboards providing relevant visibility for different user roles with the ability to take corrective actions. Sounds like a lot … and it is.
You can get data from a lot of TIBCO sources, EMS Admin for messaging metrics, Hawk for BW or AMX, transaction metrics from inside BW, JMX to get BusinessEvents info, and service-level metrics from SPM. But to get a real look at the operational state of your applications and derive the intelligence to make better decisions or improve performance and efficiency, all these data need to be tied together and analyzed with historical context. RTView Enterprise Monitor is designed to do this and provide rich end-to-end application monitoring across the enterprise.
RTView is feature-filled and integrates tightly with all TIBCO products. Even more important is the business value that it can provide for an enterprise. We expound on the key points listed below in another blog post: Enterprise Application Monitoring: The Business Value
- RTView Facilitates Collaboration Between Application and Infrastructure Team
- RTView Reduces Information Overload – Users See Only What They Need to See
- RTView’s Distributed Architecture can Scale to Very Large Organizations
The above are key concepts often overlooked when considering requirements for a comprehensive enterprise-wide monitoring solution.
RTView for TIBCO – current state and future direction
TIBCO and SL Corporation continue to work together to provide the best monitoring solutions so users can make more effective use of the TIBCO Application Integration products. As TIBCO introduces new products into its suite, RTView keeps pace with its new releases. For example, SL Corporation has developed a new Enterprise Monitor solution package that provides comprehensive monitoring for TIBCO BusinessEvents and soon, ActiveSpaces.
The TIBCO Spotfire product has been enjoying a lot of success in the TIBCO community. Note that the historical data produced by the RTView monitoring products is stored to standard SQL databases, with an easily digestible schema, and can readily be viewed in Spotfire for analysis and historical reporting.
It is expected that the TIBCO Service Performance Monitor (SPM) will be enhanced over time. As this happens, RTView Enterprise Monitor will be able to integrate service-level metrics and alerts collected there and correlate them with other monitoring data, especially those collected from non-TIBCO components.
