News

Tool said to tie infrastructure, service management

• By Lana Gates
• April 29, 2004

Compuware officials contend that it is now possible to tie infrastructure management to service management via the new Release 9.1 of its Vantage product, and to have a richer set of network information associated with it.

"Because we have this richer set [of network information], we're in a better position to help organizations look at infrastructure in terms of the business model," explained Lloyd Bloom, Vantage product manager.

"If you have that information, you can distribute the cost of operating a WAN infrastructure across multiple applications or locations. If you understand your business applications, you can understand how each of those is consuming resources," he added.

Service management by nature focuses on monitoring key aspects of the infrastructure, with some aspects on the client side, the network and the server side. Data from those various monitoring points helps organizations to understand whether or not the infrastructure is supporting their services, Bloom explained.

Being able to identify all the applications going across the network, he added, provides opportunities to reduce costs. "The same tools are managing service levels. You might as well get double duty out of them to help reduce costs."

According to Bloom, Vantage 9.1 can help reduce IT costs by looking for actual savings in infrastructure (or identifying waste), providing a chargeback report that shows what it costs to run all of an organization's applications, and by identifying opportunities of when not to expand bandwidth and resources by pointing out where an organization can improve its infrastructure.

The product provides information to understand the impact of an organization's infrastructure, Bloom said. This can aid developers by revealing where bottlenecks occur.

Vantage is said to present such information as management views of application service from the end-user perspective. In addition, it manages applications at the business, transaction and infrastructure level, and integrates service metrics with end-to-end performance analysis.