S3 adds another value called a signature, which is like a baseline, but takes into account what are normal minimums, maximums and averages. We found the signature to be a particularly good basis for setting exceptions, though we were able to set exceptions based on any of these values. S3's application monitoring supports ODBC drivers for Oracle, as well as the commonly known TCP and UDP sockets. S3's evaluation of performance is based on tests performed on network devices on server TCP ports and by monitoring the application. All three are set up independently, manually and painfully.
Network monitoring is fairly straightforward, starting with utilization of network devices.
By testing for services on TCP ports, and by defining specific application transactions, all three could be correlated to monitor the application completely. Tracking of service levels or service management is well integrated. From a central server, we created synthetic transactions that ran from NextPoint agents against application and network servers. SLA tracking is divided into meeting, marginal and exceeding categories for statistics such as total response time. These service levels are then reported in the application matrix overview, where we could drill down into the specific data points for each part of the system being monitored.