News

Compuware Launches Biz App APM Tool

• By John K. Waters
• June 19, 2013

Compuware Corp. has released a new application performance management (APM) tool designed to expose how underlying IT infrastructure affects the performance of business applications. The company is billing its new PureStack Technology as the first of its kind to extend the depth and range of APM solutions to provide vertical performance analysis.

"Our PurePath Technology already provides a horizontal tracing of a transactions across infrastructure," explained Kieran Taylor, director of the marketing for the company's APM Business Unit. "Bringing these two technologies together -- horizontal and vertical -- effectively creates cross hairs for IT and operations that quickly identifies, on a per user or per transaction level, the underlying cause for poor performance."

The Detroit-based APM solutions provider's PurePath Technology provides cross-tier transaction detail (end-user and code-level context), while PureStack discovers, maps and collects critical system and infrastructure health information along the infrastructure stack, including the hypervisor, the operating system, storage, process and CPU. Together, PureStack and PurePath provide what amounts to a three-dimensional view of how infrastructure health impacts application performance and availability, the company says.

Among other things, this combination is likely to provide a kind of relief for developers, who often get blamed for performance problems that have nothing to do with their applications. "In a typical scenario -- let's say the help desk -- a user complains about poor performance, and then you're looking at stove pipes within an organization in terms of roles and tools," Taylor told ADTmag. "We've been able to give you the application-specific detail, but many times the culprits might be CPU utilization, available memory, disk I/O, how the hypervisor or the OS is performing -- metrics that are lower level to the application, yet intrinsically involved in the performance of any transaction. We're now pulling in guest and host infrastructure health metrics and correlating that with individual transactions in real time."

PureStack provides detail on these infrastructure components in conjunction with a bottom-up impact analysis that shows every user request, as well as all categories of user requests, across applications and business transactions that use a specific infrastructure component, Taylor explained. Every transaction is recorded along with all system health metrics, and can be "played back" when a performance problem is detected, he added.

APM tools monitor and manage the performance of applications, alerting IT staff in real time to availability disruptions and end user quality issues. Leading products in this category also notice trends and/or early warning signs of imminent trouble and provide automatic resolutions. Compuware is listed among the leaders in this market in Gartner's "magic quadrant." Also listed are IBM, BMC software, CA Technologies, New Relic, AppDynamics and Opnet Technologies.

PureStack has been in customers' hand since May 23, but just recently went to the general availability stage.

Compuware's PureStack Technology is available now. More information is available on the company Web site here.