In January of this year, HostBridge Technology announced the HostBridge Transaction Analytics Connector (HTAC) for putting CICS on SIEM or APM dashboards. As customers and prospects have begun to explore and test it, we get questions. Here’s a recent exchange between a customer and HostBridge co-founder and CEO, Russ Teubner:

Q: Does HTAC only work with Splunk?

A: No. HTAC works with other SIEM or APM solutions as described here.

There are plenty of opinions about which Application Performance Management (APM) tools are best, as evidenced by this Quora post.  At HostBridge, we demonstrate HTAC with Splunk, but we have “no dog in that fight.” HTAC is independent of any analytics platform.

HTAC works with ANY mechanism that shuttles SMF data to a log management/analytics platform.  Splunk has a good following in our customer base, and it’s easy to make nice dashboards.  Elastic is also gaining traction.

LogDNA is interesting, but it really does have very “log’ish” orientation. It’s ability to create dashboards on the fly seems limited by comparison to Splunk. However, if LogDNA catches on, then that’s fine by me.

What HTAC really does is extract data from requests and enhance the Origin data carried around in the monitor record, and replicated by CICS Transaction Tracking for the Group.  Thus, we don’t care how the data is externalized.

But, in order to achieve correlation across machine data produced by various platforms, it is important for the analytics platform to have good capabilities to correlated disparate log records in order to achieve a holistic view.

Trial HTAC for Free

If you use Splunk – or another APM solution as described above, you can test HTAC for free. Learn more about what HTAC can do and download a copy to test by visiting our HTAC information and download page. If you’d like to talk about using HTAC with your SIEM or APM solution, please contact us: