IT managers needing to monitor and troubleshoot network applications have had their options boosted by Fluke Networks' Visual Performance Manager.

Fluke Networks European field marketing manager Benny Vogels said, "Visual Performance Manager (VPM) 4.0 will use a new datacentre appliance we're launching, to enable IT departments to measure application transaction performance, as well as response time."

The appliance-based package unifies a number of technologies gained by Fluke Networks through its takeovers of Crannog Software in January 2007, and Visual Networks in 2005. VPM 4.0 uses transaction analysis software running on a hardened Linux OS-based Application Performance Appliance (APA), according to Vogels. The APA is based on Dell's PowerEdge 2950 rack server hardware, and has dual quad-core Intel Xeon 5440 processors and 16GB of system memory. The six 300GB, 15K rpm, serial attached SCSI drives, run a RAID 10 configuration which gives high availability by mirroring data.

Vogels said that although the platform hardware is Dell's the firm had made some additions to it. "We developed the 4-port gigabit Ethernet, acquisition board ourselves. This gives us the ability to do line-rate, deep packet inspection with the board, by using field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs)," he said, adding that the card would deal with 10 gigabit Ethernet speeds.

Vogels added that the system supported all IP, TCP and UDP network protocols and the custom data acquisition card could filter and de-duplicate all the application data from networked applications before analysis, meaning that server CPU is not impacted.

Vogels said that the system can perform, "Transaction level, ie. network layer 7 analysis of SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle and Web-based applications," and added, "We can filter the network packet, and hand over that packet to the transaction analysis engine for processing, letting us connect a front end process to a back end server one – we think that's pretty unique."