Correlsense SharePath - monitoring the health of transaction systems

After a rousing game of calendar tag, I had an opportunity to speak with the folks at Correlsense. The company is tightly focused on helping organizations fully understand and then address performance issues with their distributed applications. They call their product SharePath.

By instrumenting the entire path from the end user back to the servers, Correlsense claims that SharePath offers the capabilities of end-to-end transaction monitoring, application performance management, and service level management. The goals, of course, are finding and, it is hoped, quickly resolving performance issues, issues; understanding the performance of various load balancing and load sharing facilities; better understanding the implications of infrastructure enhancements or changes; and track and report security and compliance issues.

Snapshot Analysis

Correlsense is one of a number (I know of something on the order of thirty) suppliers offering products in this area. The largest suppliers of management and security software would claim that their products can do everything that SharePath does and have been offering those products for quite a number of years.

Correlsense would point out that those broad, powerful and quite complex offerings certainly can do many of the things that their product does. Correlsense hopes to get to the head of the pack by offering a product that is simple, focused and efficient.

While the technology certainly appears interesting, I believe Correlsense's biggest chalenge is cutting through all of the noise and getting to the correct IT or business decision maker rather than a significant technological challenge. Correlsense isn't a household name at this point. The largest of Correlsense's competition have a brand recognition that took years to develop. Correllsense will have to focus on making people aware of the company and its products, helping some decide to consider the products and then providing enough information proving that its products are somehow better than the competition.