Compuware APM Update Adds Cloud Support

Compuware recently announced a major new release of its integrated application performance management (APM) solution, the Compuware APM platform, with new support for mobile, cloud, Big Data and streaming applications.

The Compuware APM Spring 2012 Platform Release introduces a new generation of APM with four innovations across its dynaTrace and Gomez product brands that help customers optimise the performance and value of their business-critical applications.

Expansion

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.

“We tripled down on APM as a key part of our business,” John Van Siclen, general manager of the Compuware APM Business Unit, told eWEEK. “It’s been seriously expanded over the last few years through acquisitions – Gomez and dynaTrace – as well as organic growth. Now we’re bringing the best of these technologies together. The Spring release is the coming out of this organic, converged approach for Compuware.”

“Application performance management is becoming a top priority for more and more IT organisations as applications become more distributed, mobile and dynamic,” said Mary Johnston Turner, research vice president for Enterprise System Management Software at IDC. “More than ever, IT leaders are challenged to maintain end user service levels and to proactively detect and remediate problems before they impact the business.” Turner added that Compuware addresses “top priority pain points facing many IT teams today.”

Mobile computing, the cloud and streaming are all rapidly growing areas, adding to the complexity and challenge of maintaining application performance to grow revenue, protect brand reputation and decrease costs, Compuware said in its press release on the APM Spring 2012 release.

Managing this challenge requires visibility and deep-dive analytics across the entire application delivery chain to rapidly find and fix problems that may occur in the data centre, cloud or the end user’s device. At the same time, organisations are challenged to deliver applications with more features, in shorter cycles and with fewer resources.

New generation

Compuware’s Spring 2012 release tackles these challenges with a new generation of APM innovations that address complexity at the edge, converged network and application performance, cloud and Big Data needs, and faster time to market.

The new Compuware User Experience Management (UEM) solution simplifies performance management at the edge of the internet, enabling customers to optimise end-user experience and decrease abandonment through comprehensive UEM and performance analytics for mobile applications and browser applications.

It also features 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.

“Complexity at the edge has been exploding, Van Siclen said. “One-third or more of some application processing is happening in the browser without any visibility from the data centre. So you need to start your monitoring from the browser.”

Compuware offers visibility into all aspects of mobile application performance including user actions in the mobile application. The new Compuware platform also provides capabilities. And the flexible UEM deployment options allow customers to choose either Software as a Service (SaaS) or on-premises enterprise.

Increasing challenges

Compuware APM also combines application and network performance management to tackle the increasing challenges of complex data centres, resulting in reduced mean-time-to-resolve (MTTR), slashed performance management costs and simplified deployments, the company said.

The product’s out-of-the-box dashboards provide a single view of application and network performance. A single point of instrumentation delivers network diagnostics in context of application performance. Integrated synthetic monitoring enables proactive monitoring for web and non-web applications. Auto-correlated code-level analysis provides drill-down to application root cause in seconds via the integrated dynaTrace PurePath analysis.

And new pricing and entry-level offerings enable single application and project-based deployments, with seamless extensibility into a comprehensive APM solution.

Compuware’s new Enterprise APM for cloud and Big Data applications features Compuware dynaTrace Enterprise, which simplifies performance optimisation, operation and management of modern, dynamic applications.

Steve Tack, Compuware’s CTO, said the product provides a deep transaction management solution for dynamic cloud and big data applications, with visibility into both Cassandra NoSQL and Hadoop Map/Reduce Big Data environments. The solution also features auto-discovery, auto-adaptive PurePath instrumentation to enable cloud application visibility even for multi-cloud – such as VMware vCloud plus Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Windows Azure – and hybrid cloud environments.

Architectural enhancements

Compuware added architectural enhancements to reduce time-to-value and support new pricing that allows IT teams to easily start with a single application and cost-effectively scale to enterprise-wide deployments, the company said.

“A lot of the capability we’re delivering is to help our customers who are adopting new business models – whether public or private cloud, or adopting Big Data,” Tack said.
Compuware is delivering faster time-to-value with out-of-the-box zero configuration dashboards and smarter baselining based on behavioral analytics, he said.

New pricing and entry-level offerings enable single application and project-based deployments, with extensibility into a comprehensive APM solution, the company said.

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