Application management specialist Wily has released a new version of its flagship product. The company said that its Wily 6 software would give IT managers and administrators access to the "black hole" of application diagnostics, and provide a clear view of where problems have occurred and what caused them.

Wily 6 offers end-to-end application management capabilities. Matt Price, director of marketing and alliances at Wily, said that the growing use of J2EE and Java applications is making web systems more important to businesses, government agencies and telcos. He added that as IT vendors such as Siebel are repurposing their applications for use on the web, the ability to check how well such applications perform is becoming more important to firms. " We can make sure something works across the platform and the business," he said. "And we can do this in real time."

Price said the tools also provide the ability to monitor live applications, and argued that the alternative of testing applications using dummy transactions is not satisfactory. "It is impossible to replicate a live environment in tests."

Price said many organisations that have tested the Wily 6 system have been surprised by how many errors it has identified, and by the insights that it has provided.

"Up till now it has been impossible to know when or how problems have occurred," Price said. "The inclusion of Error Detector in Wily 6 can tell administrators both when someone is getting an error, and what has caused it."

IT managers and application developers will be helped by the granularity of the reports generated by the system, said Price. He added that the reports can show precisely where problems have occurred, thus making it clear who is responsible for fixing them. "You can isolate issues right down to their cause," he said.

The Wily 6 release includes the following products: Introscope 6.0, Introscope ErrorDetector, Introscope PowerPack for IBM WebSphere MQ and Introscope Browser Response Time Adapter.