Today i read "Pre-plan your meltdown" by BurtonGroup, about how complex IT-infrastructures have become, and how difficult it is to troubleshoot problems. In it, i read about "dye tracing", basically following each step of a transaction in detail, in order to identify where the biggest delay is. I wondered what tools would help you get an insight into transactions, and found this article at Techtarget, mentioning CA's Introscope Transaction Tracer, HP's Transaction Analyzer, Quest Software's PerformaSure, IBM Tivoli's Composite Applications Manager and Symphoniq's TrueVue . Good to know ;-).

The Burton-article mentions other usefull tools for infra-management/problem resolution:

- Measurement: Probes from Attachmate NetIQ, Brix, CA, Compuware ClientVantage, Fluke Networks, HP Internet Services and SiteScope, NetScout, Network Physics. Active probes: Cisco IP SLA (“SAA”), Juniper RPM; F5 monitors. “Agentless” (passive, server-side) web probes: CA (Wily) Customer Experience Manager, Compuware ClientVantage Agentless Monitoring, Coradiant TrueSight

- Change Management and Audit: BMC Atrium CMDB, CA CMDB, CA (Wily) Introscope ChangeDetector, Netcordia NetMRI

- “Root Cause” analysis: CA Spectrum, EMC SMARTS, InfoVista VistaInsight for Networks

While browsing for this info, i ran into eWeeks "Systems Mgt special report", where i read about managed WAN-optimization by Virtela (attracted my interest as a customer was requesting a new WAN and considering WAN-optimization/application acceleration devices): sounds good to :-).