B-hive Conductor™

B-hive Conductor provides virtual infrastructure groups visibility into the multi-tier applications (performance, usage and dependencies) running across both virtual and physical infrastructure. Easy to install and non-intrusive, the self-configuring solution discovers, monitors and reports within minutes of download.

Conductor is tightly integrated with industry leading infrastructure virtualization solutions such as VMware Infrastructure. Conductor also integrates with Level 7 Network traffic solutions including F5 Big-IP and Citrix NetScaler. Conductor takes advantage of these integration points to automate virtualization and traffic routing functions so that applications' performance and cost align with their business service level policies.

Conductor's main features include:

• Dynamic self-mapping of virtual and physical infrastructure to applications and underlying end-to-end transactions
• Real-time monitoring of all infrastructure for usage and performance of the application and end-user actions
• Latency break-down for all infrastructure tiers within a single transaction context
• Reporting engine for long term tracking of service levels to end-users, usage, latency and errors
• Automatic Problem Resolution and operation efficiency optimization by communicating to virtual infrastructure and application switches

With unique self-learning technology, Conductor discovers virtual and physical infrastructure elements and ties them in a logical application flow map. It then identifies individual user calls, measuring each transaction's latency and health for any single tier or end-to-end through the data center. With the real-time knowledge of each infrastructure component's impact on the end-user experience or the application, Conductor can take automatic corrective actions when problems (such as application slow-downs, database errors, or excessive request volumes) occur.

Conductor is delivered as a VMware virtual appliance, allowing it to gather information with zero overhead and zero intrusion into the production system. Installed at various points in the data center network, Conductor monitors individual infrastructure components, correlating individual performance metrics with end user experience. Conductor then automates the real-time responses and actions needed to insure the application infrastructure best meets service levels. With Conductor, managers can focus on the overall end-user delivery and underlying costs rather than on silo-based component performance.

These automated capabilities allow Conductor to drive an intelligent operations lifecycle:

• End-to-end Logical to Physical Discovery and Mapping:
  Conductor creates an end-to-end map of all infrastructure elements such as virtual and physical servers, the application and user calls that run through them and the way they tie together in a transactional context.


• Performance Monitoring & Service Level Analysis:
  Conductor monitors real-time end user experience for all transaction requests, breaking down performance from tier to tier. Real-time metrics are compared to service level targets (as defined by the business), as well as normal baselines automatically established over time.


• Automation & Control:
  Based on set business service level policies, when performance or cost of business services does not comply with policy, Conductor takes action on its own - from leveraging the agility and automation capabilities of VMware Infrastructure for provisioning new servers to re-booting error-prone platforms to re-routing transactions around trouble spots.

B-hive's revolutionary Transaction Infrastructure technology uses deep packet data and built-in intelligence to create "virtual" copies of real transactions without using any agents. Conductor learns how these transactions use each piece of the infrastructure, allowing it to isolate performance bottlenecks (in both application and infrastructure elements) without human intervention. Unlike intrusive agents or time-consuming synthetic transactions, Conductor's technology is passive and non-intrusive, consuming minimal system and human resources. Its unique decision-making capabilities enable Conductor to automate existing virtualized system capabilities - such as the high availability and disaster recovery features of virtual servers or the L7 switching capabilities of application delivery controllers - allowing customers to fully leverage their IT operations investments.

Supported Platforms

Conductor runs as a certified VMware virtual appliance on any supported hardware platform for VMware.

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