Compuware Corporation has rolled out a major new release of its integrated application performance management (APM) solution. The Compuware APM Spring 2012 Platform Release includes four innovations across its dynaTrace and Gomez product brands that help customers optimize the performance and value of their business-critical applications. Compuware's Spring 2012 Release addresses the increasing complexity at the edge; and the need for converged network and application performance insight; enterprise APM for cloud and big data applications; and faster time to value.
This new release represents the next phase in Compuware's unified APM strategy. It is the first release of the new Compuware APM brand with Gomez and dynaTrace, as major sub-brands within it. The Gomez sub-brand includes SaaS monitoring and load-testing capabilities, while the dynaTrace sub-brand includes on-premise capabilities and represents the combination of dynaTrace, which was acquired by Compuware a year ago, and the classic Compuware Vantage product, Jeff Loeb, vice president, Product and Solutions Marketing at Compuware APM Business Unit, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
According to Compuware, the new release has been designed to help organizations deal with the challenge presented by mobile computing, the cloud and streaming which are rapidly growing areas, and making it more difficult to maintain application performance in order to grow revenue, protect brand reputation and decrease costs. Managing this challenge, the company says, requires visibility and deep-dive analytics across the entire application delivery chain to find and fix problems that may occur in the data center, cloud or the end user's device. Addressing these concerns, Compuware's Spring 2012 Release includes APM innovations that address the increasing complexity at the edge, the need for converged network and application performance insight, enterprise APM for cloud and big data applications, and faster time to value.
Performance Management at the Edge
"As systems and applications shift from 'systems of record' to 'systems of engagement,' companies are putting business- and mission-critical applications directly into the hands of end users - and end users have very high expectations about the experiences and performance, and they have these expectations across all the different devices that are being used - desktop, tablet, or smartphone, etc.," Loeb notes. The combination of the shift to systems of engagement, and increased customer expectations, along with the challenges of the application delivery chain are making it harder to deliver those quality experiences because of that complexity at the edge, he adds.
Compuware User Experience Management (UEM) simplifies performance management at the edge of the internet, enabling customers to optimize end-user experience and decrease abandonment, by offering: comprehensive UEM and performance analytics for mobile applications and browser applications; deep transaction visibility with embedded PurePath technology for insight into application execution at the edge for all browsers and device types, including code-level details, incidents and visit histories; visibility into mobile application performance including user actions in the mobile application; comprehensive and actionable synthetic streaming media capabilities; and flexible UEM deployment options that allow customers to choose either SaaS or on-premises enterprise.
Converged Network and Application Performance Management
Compuware APM combines application and network performance management to tackle the increasing challenges of complex data centers, to achieve reduced mean-time-to-resolve (MTTR), decreased performance management costs, and simplified deployments. The Spring release provides: out-of-the-box dashboards for a single view of application and network performance; a single point of instrumentation delivering network diagnostics in context of application performance; integrated synthetic monitoring enabling proactive monitoring for web and non-web applications; and auto-correlated code-level analysis which provides drill-down to application root causes via dynaTrace PurePath analysis.
According to Loeb, one of the first objectives after identifying that there is a problem is to identify where that problem is - what's the fault domain. The enhanced dashboards, he notes, enable rapid fault domain isolation to make it easier to identify which "haystack" the problem is in.
Enterprise APM for Cloud and Big Data Applications
According to Compuware, dynaTrace Enterprise simplifies performance optimization, operation and management of modern, dynamic applications, providing deep transaction management solution for dynamic cloud and big data applications; visibility into both Cassandra NoSQL and Hadoop MapReduce big data environments; and auto-discovery, auto-adaptive PurePath instrumentation enabling the deepcloud application visibility even for multi-cloud (i.e., vCloud + EC2 and/or Azure) and hybrid cloud environments.
Enhanced Architecture and Packaging for Faster Time-to-Value and Improved Scalability
The new release also includes architectural enhancements that reduce time-to-value and support new pricing so IT teams can easily start with a single application and scale to enterprise-wide deployments. In addition, faster time-to-value is also enabled, the company says, with out-of-the-box dashboards and improved baselining based on behavioral analytics. And finally, new pricing and entry-level offerings are intended to enable single application and project-based deployments, with extensibility into a comprehensive APM solution.
For more details on all the new enhancements included in the Compuware APM Spring 2012 Platform Release, go here.