Optier is an Application Performance Management (APM) product. It addresses performance of an application from business transaction perspective. You must define what business transaction means for you by configuring Optier and adjusting your application's code.

In order to try Optier you can't just download and play with it, you must leave your contacts and Optier guys will contact you. So thanks to my customers for already having Optier on their servers.

Although it looks very similar to New Relic and AppDymanic monitoring products Optier has more complex deployment. First native Optier agent must be installed to every machine with applications to monitor. Optier agent receives monitoring data from applications running on that machine and forwards the data to Optier Server. If Optier Server is not available the agent caches all monitoring data locally and dumps the cache once the server becomes available. Optier server is used to aggregate and represent monitoring data in layers and diagrams and its UI is too authentic for my taste (business data is not shown for a known reason).


Your application's code must be changed in order to send monitoring data to Optier agent and finally to be propagated to Optier Server. Optier provides its own SDK that should be used in order to communicate between your application and Optier agent. The main idea of the changes in your apps is to notify Optier when you start your business transaction and when you finish.

If you don't want to change your code Optier provides an alternative: you can build custom javaagent and let Optier instrument your app. Again you must define when your business transaction starts and when it ends however now you may configure it with xml config which partially consists of a java code. For example assuming that PersistentRecord class has executeUpdate method instrumentation config will look like this:


Optier is often referenced as "CoreFirst Optier" so if you see magic constants like "CoreFirst" or "CF" you now know what it means.

From my experience our business people are very happy to see plots and diagrams Optier is able to provide. They are constantly checking the number of business transactions in particular to predict trends. Also our support team is getting a lot of useful information from performance point of view. For example some of our business transactions must be always executed pretty fast and if they don't that should be treated as an issue and a subject for further investigation.

Have a great day,

Vladimir Krasilschik @ Kupchino Labs,
Saint-Petersburg, Russia

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