Topaz Prism with SSL support examines Secure Socket Layer data to passively monitor and optimize application traffic and performance in secure environments.

by Wayne Kawamoto [October 15, 2001]

Mercury Interactive Corp., a provider of enterprise testing and application performance management solutions, and nCipher, a developer of Internet security products for e-commerce and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) applications, announced an integrated Web performance and security solution is available now for a monthly fee.

"Topaz Prism with SSL support is the first solution that enables ISPs to passively monitor encrypted Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Internet traffic in a secure environment," said David Reichman, director of product marketing for Mercury Interactive. "The new integration between Mercury Interactive's Topaz Prism and nCipher's nForce will enables service providers to differentiate themselves in a very competitive market and to provide a value-added Web performance services to their Enterprise customers."

"Today's Internet is rich with SSL-secured information and our customers are asking us to help them better manage the performance of applications that use encrypted data," added Reichman. "For example, an online banking application contains encrypted information that a customer wants fast access to. IT managers were unable to see a problem occurring within secure applications until it reached a potentially disastrous performance breakdown. The integrated Topaz Prism and nForce solution will alert managers so they can quickly address issues experienced by actual users before it costs the company in customer satisfaction or customer churn."

Topaz Prism with SSL support is designed to enable IT managers passively monitor encrypted Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Internet traffic in a secure environment. The new integration between Mercury Interactive's Topaz Prism and nCipher's nForce should help IT professionals find performance degradation or bottlenecks for actual users and identify the root causes of problems for faster resolution.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), the leading security protocol on the Internet, encrypts and decrypts information for online transmission. But because the protocol is secure, it's often been difficult for IT professionals to determine and identify application performance problems. With the new integrated software and hardware solution from Mercury Interactive and nCipher, administrators should be able to monitor the performance experienced by all end users, all the time, and obtain a complete performance analysis.

Topaz Prism is a Web performance monitor that enables IT administrators to measure the online experience of every user, quantify the impact of performance problems, and pinpoint whether delays are being caused by the server or the network.

According to Mercury Interactive, Topaz Prism works like this:

Step 1. Topaz Prism is plugged into the switch used by the Web servers of the application being monitored.

Step 2. By tracking all traffic to and from the Web servers, Topaz Prism monitors the performance experienced by every user around the clock.

Step 3. Topaz Prism then reports on abandonment rates as well as bottlenecks caused by specific Web servers, load balancers or the network.

Step 4. Performance data is reported back to the Topaz Console via HTTP or HTTPS, providing a central view for application performance management. If performance degrades beyond acceptable levels, alerts are sent to operations groups.

The Topaz Console runs on Windows NT, Windows 2000, or UNIX servers; the Topaz Recorder (the engine that gets the data) runs on Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2000; the Topaz Egnine runs on Sun Solaris 2.6; and the Topaz Probe runs on Sun Solaris or Linux.

Topaz Prism is designed to alert site managers when performance exceeds specified thresholds, thus enabling the quick resolution of problems before they significantly affect end users. Topaz Prism is installed next to the Web server infrastructure, so that it can "listen" to every request sent to the Web server from any Internet Service Provider (ISP) or user's location. Being able to capture all requests should enable IT managers to identify slow segments, faulty routers, and ISP peering problems, and arm them with the data needed to ensure service level agreements (SLAs) are enforced.

One of the biggest concerns when monitoring the performance of encrypted transactions is maintaining data integrity. Mercury Interactive claims to have taken great care to ensure Topaz Prism performs its monitoring job, but keeps data safe.

To avoid security exposures, IT administrators store the corresponding public key on the Topaz Prism system in encrypted form. Topaz Prism then uses the key to decrypt SSL packets, and never sends the key across a network. Nor does Topaz Prism store the key on a disk in an insecure format. Topaz Prism forwards only the required information about URLs and performance statistics to the Topaz Prism Engine, and holds the decrypted information only for the time necessary to perform the analysis.

"nCipher is committed to providing powerful SSL acceleration technology to alleviate bottlenecks and optimize Web performance," concluded Richard Moulds, vice president of marketing at nCipher. "Using our technology together, Mercury Interactive and nCipher allow IT to analyze and manage the performance of business transactions in secure and encrypted environments."

Availability and pricing
Topaz Prism with SSL support is available now and starts at $7,500 per month.

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