Intercept Studio 4.1

asp:review

Intercept Studio 4.1

Application Monitoring at its Best

By Anand Narayanaswamy

Developing applications for both Windows and Webenvironments is indeed a challenging task for developers. It is extremelycritical to gauge the loading speed and monitor several activities of an application,such as performance, stability, testing, uniformity across different browsers,and much more. If a Web application loads slowly, then efforts should be takento reduce that so visitors can access the site quickly. My search for softwareto monitor the health of my .NET applications lead me to Intercept Studio.Developed by AVIcode, Inc. (http://www.avicode.com),Intercept Studio provides a powerful engine with which developers easily cantest various functions of ASP.NET, Web services, remoting, and ADO.NET-basedapplications.

To work with Intercept Studio you must install fiveexecutable files (including the files for a 64-bit system) and a help manual. Itested the product on a Windows XP Professional SP2 system with 512 MB of RAM.I first went through the documentation, particularly the Quick Start section,to find out which files I should install; it clearly outlined the requiredinformation, along with detailed steps. The installation is a two-step process;I had to install the SE-Viewer Server and the Agent. While the SE-Viewer is abrowser-based application (see Figure 1), the agent looks similar to that of theInternet Information Server (IIS) console (see Figure 2).

Figure 1: SE-Viewer Server loadedwith a performance result of an application.

Figure 2: Intercept Agent Console inaction.

The server utility installs as a virtual directory on themanagement system and receives events generated by the Agent console. It is veryeasy to work with Intercept Studio if you correctly follow the initial stepsmentioned in the documentation. One note of caution: change back the initialsettings to its earlier state after working with Intercept Studio; otherwise,it continues to automatically monitor all applications as you open them.

The core feature of the product is that it closelymonitors your application at run time by seamlessly integrating into the .NETFramework with minimal impact on performance, and also delivers real-timenotification of any performance or code problems that occur, including completeroot-cause analysis (as shown in Figure 1). You ll also see the name of thecomputer from which the event has been invoked, but I have deliberately erasedit for security reasons. Moreover, Intercept Studio is WMI compatible and caneasily integrate with other WMI products. It enables event routing between yourmonitored system, management system, and the developer s workstation using theserver, agent, and plug-in utilities, as mentioned earlier.

The monitored system is where the .NET applications run,and the Intercept Agent monitors various critical factors, such as Exception,Performance, Event log, and Instrumentation-related problems through ExceptionDiagnostic, Operations, and Service monitor. On the other hand, the managementsystem utility named SE-Viewer Server retrieves and displays all eventsgenerated from the monitored system. An interesting feature of the tool is thatit allows you to view events and also enables you to route events to otherevent Management Systems, such as MOM, or to defect tracking systems. It alsosupports monitoring non-networked computers and 64-bit .NET 2.0 architectureapplications.

The product collects and correlates key performancecounters, such as State Counters, Trend Analysis Counters, and Event ContextCounters. It supports on-the-fly configuration, which enables fastercustomization of data collection thresholds and triggers. An interestingfeature of Intercept Studio is that developers can easily create reports byutilizing the built-in support for Microsoft Reporting Services, and it integrateswith Team Foundation Server. You ll find the complete list of all the featuresat http://www.avicode.com/productsinterceptstudiofeatures.htm;you can also download product brochures in PDF format from http://www.avicode.com/resourcesproductliterature.htm#Intercept.

The vendor also provides the required plug-in files forintegrating the product with Visual Studio 2005. With the help of the plug-in,you can view the actual line of defective source code and rectify the problem toprevent your application from behaving badly. Intercept Studio comes withcomprehensive documentation, which explores all the features of the productwith helpful screenshots. I was impressed by the way in which the informationis presented; even beginners can get started working with the product if theyfollow the step-by-step instructions outlined in the manual.

The vendor provides excellent support (http://www.avicode.com/supporthome.htm)through phone and e-mail, and conducts live orientation training through LiveMeeting for those customers who want to explore quickly the full benefits ofthe product. Moreover, you can download free video demonstrations by visiting http://www.avicode.com/resourcesvideosanddemos.htm.I hope these resources will be of great help for those who want to learn theadvanced features of the product.

AVIcode provides access to a secured portal for customers,from where they can download new releases of the product, as well as updateddocumentation. Customers can also browse through the knowledge base hosted onthe portal and directly contact the product team if they have any questions. I dalso like to see AVIcode create an online public discussion forum so visitorsto the site can learn more about the product.

Unfortunately, Intercept Studio is not affordable forordinary developers or small shops. However, with several key features notfound elsewhere, large companies and corporations would be wise to invest in InterceptStudio so as to provide their developers with a world-class product forapplication monitoring.

Anand Narayanaswamy,a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP), works as an independentconsultant and runs NetAns Technologies (http://www.netans.com),which provides Web hosting services based in Trivandrum, India. Anand also worksas a technical editor lead for http://ASPAlliance.com.He runs http://www.Learnxpress.com, http://Dotnetalbum.com, and http://Csharpfaq.com. Anand is the author of Community Server Quickly (Packt Publishing). Youcan explore more information about the book at http://www.communityserverbook.com.Find out more about him at http://www.visualanand.netor e-mail him at mailto:[email protected]

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Web Site: http://www.avicode.com

Price: Onemonitored server, US$11,995; additional licenses, US$2,995