Troubleshooting the network is definitely not getting easier as service level guarantees are increasingly making performance a high priority thanks to mission-critical cloud-based services and a larger reliance on IP-based communications.
With increasing application use on the network, teasing out where the performance challenge exists is becoming crucial. Is the problem with the network or with the application itself? Answering this question is not always easy.
With that in mind, Compuware (News - Alert) recently updated its data center-monitoring application to enable businesses to more accurately pinpoint the root cause of application performance problems.
The company’s Data Center Real User Monitoring (DC RUM) solution has added automated network packet capture and analysis into monitoring features that already probe network, client and server behavior, according to the company.
With this level of detail, network engineers and application development teams can better uncover whether problems are coming from the application or from the network itself. Associated analytics span the entire transaction, from the network TCP session to the application logic.
Compuware has long been innovative in the application performance monitoring space. It offers application performance management as a service, has APM (News - Alert) that can bring insight into big data engines such as Hadoop, and its Compuware APM provides visibility into the performance of Web services in context of the application regardless of the technology stack underpinning the Web and middleware services.
It therefore makes sense that the company would add such functionality to its datacenter monitoring application.
“In the past, we've looked at application performance from the network to gather response-time performance information, but we weren't able to take you quickly from the context of the user transaction all the way down to the network packet capture,” said Steve Track, Compuware's senior vice president of product marketing. “Our goal was to allow network and application teams to collaborate so the network team, instead of looking at raw packet dumps, now has the context of the app and user transaction.”
This is exactly what enterprises need, according to Jonah Kowall, Gartner (News - Alert) research vice president.
"When you look at APM, there is a much broader audience out there who speak in application terms and not network terms,” noted Kowall. “By making enhancements to network-based products that appeal to application developers and by not speaking in network terms as much, it helps enterprises with their root cause analysis of application issues that might occur from outside of the network."
Edited by Rory J. Thompson