One of the most compelling introductions I found during VMworld 2008 was the VMware AppSpeed product/plugin. AppSpeed is the market delivery of the Beehive aquisition that VMware made last year. During the Wednesday morning keynote by Dr. Stephen Herrod, CTO, all attendees were treated to a live demonstration of the AppSpeed product along with the laundry list of what it promises to be able to do.
Profile/Learn, Monitor, Mitigate
AppSpeed, in short, will passively learn your applications to map and build awareness of the dependant systems, databases (even the query level) and infrastructure services. Once it builds a profile of your application, it can then begin to monitor and watch for problems and be able to guide you directly to the root of the problem.
