The company spent the first two decades developing system monitoring applications for a variety of IBM mainframes and their corresponding software, their first being OMEGAMON which saw quick widespread adoption in commercial enterprises.

[1] The minicomputers at the lab were Chernick's first hands-on experience with computers; with a fellow employee, he learned how to program in BASIC.

Following this, Chernick deviated from his original career path of medicine to work as a software developer for Computer Science Corporation (CSC)'s Canadian subsidiary in Ontario.

In 1975, Chernick convinced Canada Life's Ontario branch to let him use their mainframes as a development platform for an application that monitored system performance, in exchange for a bargain license for the final product.

[2]: 116  Immediately afterward, Chernick established Candle Services Corporation from his apartment in Toronto in October 1976 and began selling OMEGAMON door-to-door to various businesses (one such being Datacrown, where he unsuccessfully vied for employment).

In January 1981, the company released OMEGAMON/CICS, a performance monitor oriented toward the financial sector and their transaction processing systems.

[7] OMEGACENTER was one of the first performance measuring applications with a graphical user interface, via the Status Monitor tool.

[9]: 44  In late 1992, Candle moved its headquarters to a 150,000-square-foot building in the Water Garden area of Santa Monica, in the biggest office lease within Los Angeles County in 1992.

[3]: 64  To this end, Candle acquired several companies: CleverSoft, Inc., a provider of management tools for servers running Lotus Notes based in Scarborough, Maine;[15][16] AMSYS North America, a service provider for MQSeries based in Mendon, Massachusetts;[17] PowerQ Software Corporation, a maker of MQSeries software development and testing environments; and Apertus Technologies' MQView for distributed MQSeries installations.

[19][3]: 65  In the same year, the company shifted its focus to e-commerce and launched eBA*ServiceMonitor, a comprehensive monitoring application for online businesses.

In 2002, the company released PathWAI, a line of software packages and consulting services for streamlining the process of designing and developing middleware and web server back-ends.