Application performance management (APM) might not be the sexiest topic in the technology industry today but with the rise of mobile, virtualisation and cloud it is an increasingly important one. Compuware today announced its Gomez Fall release and claimed eight industry firsts for the sector in the process.
The firm said Gomez Fall 2011 Platform Release can help companies drive revenue, strengthen brand equity and increase customer satisfaction. The ‘industry-firsts’ include a "comprehensive" mobile and streaming media performance monitoring and testing network; deepened collaboration with Google thanks to Mobile Page Speed integration; advanced end-user experience performance analytics and deep application visibility and diagnostics via integration with dynaTrace, which it acquired in the summer.
Compuware’s Michael Allen told us Compuware has harmonised its delivery schedules for APM, now with two major releases per year. It’s also de-emphasised its Vantage APM brand, instead going to market with the Gomez moniker which it owns through the acquisition of Gomez in 2009 for $295m.
"This is the first combined release of Gomez and dynaTrace," Allen told us. "With that integration we can follow a transaction from the data centre, through the web tier, Java and .Net or C++, and back out again. IT infrastructures are now complex, virtualised environments, and you need to be able to pinpoint why a specific users’ transaction slowed down and do something about it."
In fact Compuware says the latest release enables companies to monitor and optimise their web, non-web, mobile, streaming and cloud applications before the end-user is impacted.
The latest release adds far more in the way of analytics, real-user monitoring, synthetic monitoring, integration with Google Mobile Page Speed, streaming media monitoring (such as Flash and Silverlight) which measures the likes of bitrate changes, code-level analysis and "360° Web Load Testing".
That last feature is claimed to enable the testing of web, mobile and cloud applications from the customer’s point of view and resolve problems across the entire application delivery chain – from the First Mile to the Last Mile. It draws on both Gomez and dynaTrace.
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There’s also unified network and application performance management with application-to-network correlation, expanded integration with business service management modules such as Microsoft SCOM, BMC Performance Manager, HP Operations Manager, SolarWinds, Netcool and Nagios: around 80 third-party tools are now supported. It’s also upped its SAP app analysis capabilities.
Commenting on the announcement, Ovum’s Michael Azoff, Principal Analyst, said, "Compuware is beginning to integrate its recent dynaTrace acquisition, making possible closed-loop analysis of operational performance issues for developers, with source code level identification – a strong play in the DevOps market."
