Technology performance company Compuware announced two new solutions aimed at reducing complexity in the data center and the cloud. Compuware APM for Mainframe provides transaction management capabilities, intended to help administrators more rapidly resolve performance problems, reduce MIPS costs, postpone hardware upgrades and accelerate time-to-market for new applications. In addition, a second new solution, Outage Analyzer, tracks cloud and third-party web service outages with instant notification of cause and impact. Outage Analyzer is available now as a free service.
There are four key trends driving the need for a new generation of application performance management, Jeff Loeb, vice president of global marketing at Compuware, tells 5 Minute Briefing. These include increased complexity, with the application delivery chain crossing the edge, cloud and data center, making it harder to manage; end users' higher expectations for availability and responsiveness no matter what their device; the IT reality of doing more with less; and finally, a new understanding of the relationship between application performance and business success.
Compuware APM for Mainframe, which will be generally available November 30, is available in two versions. PurePath for z/OS CICS is designed for monitoring CICS application transactions in a CICS region or CICSPlex; and PurePath for z/OS Java is intended for monitoring mainframe Java applications.
“This extends our dynaTrace solution into the mainframe,” says Loeb. “We take the 24x7 real-time visibility that we have provided that goes from the browser and now is going all the way into the mainframe, and we are able to look across all tiers, able to see every step within the mainframe - all the CICS and Java procedures with all the timings, and we are able to do this for all transactions as well.”
APM for Mainframe maps each mainframe transaction procedure to determine which procedure steps are taking longer than expected to complete. With complete n-tier visibility from an end user's browser across web and app servers, through message brokers into CICS and all the way to the database, operators can immediately determine the problem root cause and fix issues before they turn into serious problems, according to Compuware.
Loeb says the mainframe is often seen as a black box by distributed teams. “They could see what was coming in and what was coming out and knew if there was a slowdown caused within a mainframe but there were no tools that allowed them to understand why within the context of that transaction. We are providing that now.”
Compuware's new service, Outage Analyzer, is designed to track third-party web services outages and understand their cause and impact, as well as how fast the outage spread and how long it lasted, in real time. Outage Analyzer correlates more than 8 billion data points per day, collected from the Compuware Gomez Performance Monitoring Network of more than 150,000 test locations.
Available now as a free service, Outage Analyzer will also be folded into the premium Gomez SaaS offering in 2013, says Loeb.
For more information about Compuware for Mainframe, go to www.compuware.com/application-performance-management/apm-for-mainframe.html