Oninit® Snooper — The Business Case
When an Informix-backed system slows down or breaks, the cost is paid in two places: the impact on the business while it is broken, and the time the most senior engineers spend trying to find the cause. Both are worse when the available tools only show symptoms.
Oninit® Snooper turns those investigations from days into minutes by giving the team a clear, timestamped record of every conversation between application and database — without changing the application, the database, or how anything is configured.
The business case
| Outcome | How the snoop delivers it |
|---|---|
| Faster incident resolution | Engineers see the exact slow query, the exact round trip, the exact stall — in order, with precise timing. Less guessing, fewer escalations, shorter outages. |
| No production risk | The snoop is read-only by design. It does not modify any traffic, does not change the database, and does not require any application changes. It can only observe. |
| No project to deploy | A single small program. No agent rollout, no schema change, no client library to update, and no IBM dependency to license. Deployment is hours, not weeks. |
| Use it once, keep it forever | Once installed, the same tool serves the next slow query, the next mysterious disconnect, the next vendor finger-pointing exercise. No per-incident licensing. |
What it removes from the risk register
- “We can't tell whether the slowness is the database, the network, or the application.”
- “Our investigations take days because we don't have visibility at this layer.”
- “Adding tracing to production is too risky.”
- “We're paying for senior consulting time on problems we should be able to triage in-house.”
One concrete number
A single statically linked, stripped binary of roughly one megabyte — the entire deployment artefact. No package manager, no shared libraries to track, no IBM CSDK to license at the deployment host. A typical first install — from receiving the binary to capturing a real conversation — runs to under an hour, on a single host, by a single operator.
Why Oninit
Oninit has supported the global Informix community for two decades as “the Down System Specialists.” The Snooper is built and supported by the same team that gets called when other people's Informix systems are down — the people who already do this kind of investigation for a living, productised so the customer's team can do it themselves.
Time to value
| Step | Typical effort |
|---|---|
| Receive the binary, install it on a host | Minutes. Single static binary; no package, no shared libs, no IBM dependency at the deployment host. |
| Point at the Informix server, capture the first session | Minutes. Two flags: --listen and --upstream. No application restart, no IDS restart, no sqlhosts change. |
| First operator-driven incident triage | Hours. The TSV log is shell-tool-friendly; an experienced DBA learns the column layout in one sitting. |
| Standing observability for the Informix estate | Days. Wire log shipped into the existing log platform via standard tooling; no custom parser to build. |
Next step
A short scoping call to understand the environment and the kinds of incident the Snooper would shorten. We can have a working trial in front of a non-production instance the same week.
Call +1 913 732 8892 (US) or +44 20 8133 7529 (UK), or email support@oninit.com.
The bigger picture
If you really understand what Snooper does, you realize it fundamentally changes how Informix applications can be deployed.
It allows existing Informix applications to run against any database without modification. By decoupling legacy systems from their original data layer, it removes the need for costly rewrites and enables safe, phased modernization. Organizations can preserve proven application logic while moving data and infrastructure forward—reducing risk, cost, and disruption.
A different path for legacy systems
If you really understand the implications of Snooper, you see a different path for legacy systems.
Instead of rewriting critical Informix applications, they can run unchanged on modern databases—reducing cost, risk, and time while preserving proven business logic.