The most annoying thing about any enterprise application is when performance inexplicably drops offs. What's frustrating about that is there is usually no pattern when this occurs, and it only happens from odd time to even odder time.

Murphy's Law would dictate that it will happen at just the exact time that most possible number of people will notice, and that the application in question is usually one of the most mission-critical to the company.

Jumping into this ancient morass of technological mystery this week is a company called Precise Software Solutions. Under new leadership after disengaging from underneath the corporate umbrella of Symantec, Precise is once again an independent company focused on application performance management.

Some people might scoff that there is no real such thing because all too often we're not really sure what set of business processes are tied to what specific applications, which in turn might now be linked to any number of servers. What all that means is that it doesn't take much for one flaky component of the entire system to have an adverse effect on some other component multiple layers of technology removed.

Precise aims to finally shine a light on all this with series of agents that are capable of monitoring on-line transaction processing applications, batch mode applications and applications that span multiple business partners.

The difference in the approach being taken today is that Precise is now monitoring activities at a more granular level. For example, individual tables within a given application are tracked to see how they behave. They basic goal is not to just tell you what happened when things go wrong, but rather tell you when it looks like something is about to wrong before it does.

To help achieve that goal Precise is making available a set of bet practices that the company plans to regularly update. As part of that effort, it is inviting customers to contribute observations and solutions to that database as part of an effort to create an affinity group around its product that will look out for each other's mutual self interests. In other words, a group of IT administrators that hang together won't see their applications hangs separately.

Of course, there is a lot of carping about agent technology these days. To limit the impact of agents on the production environment, Precise lets customers limit the amount of sampling they do in addition to limiting the amount of information they can send.

When it comes to applications, performance is almost every thing. It's one of the few things that people feel they can really measure. So no matter how much performance matters or not, it's one of the things that IT people get judged on most.

We also know that when it comes to performance, the deck is increasingly being stacked against applications as we move to centralize servers, add layers of virtualization and rely on increasingly fragile networks. Figuring out where a particular bottleneck is can take weeks. And once it's discovered, the associated amount of "blamestorming" across the developer, server and networking teams hardly seems to make finding out what's actually wrong worth the effort.

Precise might not get every body in IT to join hands in peace and harmony. But it sure does seem to have the potential to make the arguments about who is responsible for what a lot shorter. And that in itself might pay for the software alone, especially when you take in account how much per hour it costs to have expensive IT people sitting around a table blaming each other over things none of them can actually prove.