TIBCO Software is a global leader in integration, API management and analytics. The company recently was named a leader in the Gartner 2018 Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management report for the fourth consecutive time. TIBCO’s traditional strength in application integration is based on its enterprise service bus (ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks), message-oriented middleware (Enterprise Message Service and FTL), and off-the-shelf adapters for applications and other platforms.
TIBCO offers real-time analytics and operational intelligence, including process-intelligence Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) (in AMX BPM); business intelligence BAM, visual data discovery and predictive analytics (in Spotfire and R); business rule processing (in AMX Decisions); two stream analytics CEP platforms (BusinessEvents and StreamBase); and other capabilities.
Critical Banking and Infrastructure Dependencies Require Reliability
In large financial institutions around the world, critical processes such as online banking, mortgages and payments rely on TIBCO. If TIBCO systems were to go down, banking customers wouldn’t be able to get mortgage information, borrow money, or even pay their bills. Indeed, the importance of keeping TIBCO systems up and running is extremely high. It’s equally important for TIBCO users to identify issues, provide solutions, and respond immediately to potential problems as quickly as possible.
More Insights, Please
TIBCO’s product line is extremely powerful, but it can be complicated and expensive for many small and midsize business process management (BPM) projects. As I’ve seen quite a few times throughout my career, TIBCO can be a black box for companies, which usually lack the ability to see inside the code. The reason is that TIBCO users are not exposed to code, but instead use a GUI called TIBCO Designer to create integration projects for their enterprise environments. The good news is that application performance management (APM) software can provide insights into how TIBCO is working under the hood.
When you intend to monitor something as immensely complex as TIBCO, you need a good plan. The first step is to identify what is important and what is not. Therefore, your initial focus should be on identifying the most important business flows on the TIBCO side, and defining the most important business transactions on the APM side. Mapping the relationship between TIBCO workflows (customer/business journeys) and AppDynamics Business Transactions—a key monitoring component consisting of all required services in your environment—is the next logical step. (For a deeper dive into the philosophy of configuring BTs, read How to Identify Impactful Business Transactions in AppDynamics.)
Once mapping has been established, TIBCO users should be able to understand and ultimately resolve performance issues, as well as optimize infrastructure and application setup. But that’s just the beginning.
Dashboards for Real-Time Metrics
AppDynamics can enrich TIBCO monitoring by comparing real-time EMS metrics side-by-side with metrics measured by our Java agent in handy dashboards, providing useful insights into TIBCO’s performance. This is achieved by configuring the AppDynamics TIBCO EMS Monitoring Extension. You will need to give this extension access to your TIBCO EMS server. Our machine agent then uses the extension and feeds the data directly from the EMS server to AppDynamics, where we can display it side-by-side next to real-time metrics provided by our Java agents.
How About Some Alerts?
Of course, users also need to know when something is wrong—and not only by looking at a nice dashboard! This is why you should utilize the power of AppDynamics Health Rules, which leverage dynamic baselines to establish performance thresholds and configure them for Business Transactions. Once these rules are defined and configured, you’re all set: When AppDynamics detects a potential issue, it triggers a Health Rule and sends out a notification. This enables the user, with just a few clicks, to examine the Business Transaction snapshot and get code-level details for every anomaly, even under extreme load. Therefore, AppDynamics’ three-click drill down allows TIBCO customers to pinpoint issues in a very short amount of time.
In many respects, TIBCO is still a grey area for companies, as it is difficult, if not impossible to see its inner workings. (As mentioned above, TIBCO users never see the internal code, but instead rely on the GUI-based TIBCO Designer.) AppDynamics’ monitoring brings more insight into how TIBCO works behind scenes, and gives users a better understanding of how their configuration is tied to TIBCO code. Although it might not be meaningful to the user to see TIBCO code errors, this information could prove valuable to TIBCO support and lead to faster mean time to resolve.
A High-Level Overview
For companies using TIBCO as a backbone for their services, a cross-application flow view is exceptionally useful for seeing which applications are communicating with TIBCO. The screenshot below shows a practical, graphic representation of a TIBCO user’s environment in AppDynamics.*
AppDynamics can create an intuitive diagram of TIBCO workflows, such as one showing the health of each TIBCO operation translated into one or more Business Transactions.
Above you see a slightly different view, one more business-focused and based on normal APM data. However, if you need more detailed business-focused dashboards with funnel graphs, a number of unique transactions, or full end-to-end duration of each transaction, there is a way! All this and much more can be achieved by using AppDynamics Business iQ. (Read how AppDynamics Business Journeys provide a unified, end-to-end application view and help solve complex business problems.)
Global financial institutions depend on TIBCO’s real-time analytics and operational intelligence to keep their operations running efficiently. But TIBCO can be a black box for companies, which need a powerful APM solution to gain code-level insights into their environments and to resolve issues quickly.
*All screenshots shown in this article are not actual representations of TIBCO’s environment.
