Microsoft buys AVIcode for .Net monitoring

Microsoft has acquired AVIcode, a private company that offers application monitoring for the .NET Framework, the companies announced Wednesday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Microsoft expects the AVIcode's software will offer customers tools to better monitor their cloud-based .NET applications, according to a blog posting from Brad Anderson, a corporate vice president for Microsoft's management and security division

The company, founded in 1998, will retain its name, becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. The software will be offered through Microsoft's System Center line of software.

Microsoft has already been using AVIcode's software in its own data centres for some time, Anderson explained. The XBox Live service management team used the software to view all the transaction times of all the components, as a way of spotting outages and slow performance.

"As applications continue to leverage web 2.0 technologies like Silverlight and become ever more distributed, and as the user audience for these applications also becomes more distributed, multiple points of failure are introduced into the application environment. Discovering, diagnosing and triaging failures at the moment they occur is challenging at best, painfully time consuming and resource intensive at worst," explained Mike Curreri, CEO of AVIcode, in a blog post.

AVIcode's software allows organisations to monitor transactions and understand how well individual bits of hardware and software are supporting these transactions. Such information can then be used to more quickly diagnose problems. The software is already integrated with Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager software.

"Bringing together the capabilities of Operations Manager with the enhancements from AVIcode enables organisations to truly get the 360-degree view of their service, independent of where the service is hosted," Anderson writes.