As you may be aware (you ought to be, we have been blogging and tweeting about this continually since the announcement) we are about to release the latest version of our award winning (I have to say that it’s in my contract) Zeus Traffic Manager (ZTM).
Version 7.0 is quite an exciting release, as it really fills in a missing piece of the jigsaw that makes up application delivery as it is today. To demonstrate this there is also a new name for our whole product family “Zeus Elastic Application Delivery platform”. It does not exactly roll off the tongue, but it does describe perfectly what this development of the product is about.
There are plenty of other resources going up on our web sites, to give you all of the official feature information, and the whys and wherefores of the product. What I will try to do is give you a personal perspective on the bits I like and why, with pretty pictures and screenshots. I will split them up into a number of parts, so you don’t have to read them all if you don’t want to.
Because I am a sad, nerdy, techo-fan-boy, I will jump straight to the least commercial and most technical new feature; that I happen to think is a fantastic addition to the product. This is the feature listed as the “Real-Time Analytics Module”, basically it is an enhancement to our already useful connections page (the place where you can look at the detail of the most recent connections to have passed through the traffic manager).
What you can now have is the ability to add even more application trouble-shooting power to diagnostic tool-set built into Zeus Traffic Manager.
Before we get to the Real-Time Analytics module however, there is a quick addition to the connections page. In the form of a handy “click-to-filter” widget, allowing you quickly to display only those requests you are looking for, which on a busy ZTM is essential. From here however, the features get even better.
Do you notice the magnifying glass icon at the end of the row in the screenshot above? Clicking on this takes us into analytics itself. You zoom to a view of just the one selected request, with a nice break down of all the events in the life of the connection with the timings. Making it extremely easy to spot where any delay in getting the response out to the client is coming from.
There is also a listing of both request and response headers, giving you further insight into what is going on with your applications on the network. I have already made extensive use of these features in my simple lab environment, in “The Real World”™ I can only imagine this will become an invaluable tool.
Check in next week for Part 2 of this post.
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