Solution Guide: Application Performance Management

Transcription

1 SOLUTION GUIDE Solution Guide: Application Performance Management Making sense of the APM market jigsaw, vendor SWOT analysis, and Ovum APM 2012 Rainbow Map Reference Code: OI Publication Date: July 2012 Author: Michael Azoff SUMMARY Catalyst Application performance management (APM) today sits at a juncture that crosses many disciplines and domains: software development, applications in production, IT services, desktops, mainframes, web, mobile, cloud services, virtualization, application testing, network infrastructure, databases, and storage. APM vendors arrive in this space from different historical routes, but they all go under the same label. This report therefore aims to clarify the definition of an APM solution, and how vendors are taking their solutions forward. Ovum takes a representative group across new and established leading vendors, and provides a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis of their solutions. Ovum also conducted a comprehensive features assessment with the results summarized in the Ovum APM Rainbow Map. Ovum view APM tools can be categorized according to their target audiences. So development-oriented APM serves developers with the need to drill down to the code level, and provides the kind of information that programmers need and understand to solve code related problems. An operations-oriented APM tool will provide information about the production environment, and a single consolidated view of information meaningful to sysadmin and operations professionals. QA professionals will want details related to performance criteria that can be matched to the Ovum (Published 07/2012) Page 1

2 application's non-functional requirements. Furthermore, a new generation of APM tools monitor the end-to-end production environment, tracking distinct business transactions that cross multiple services and devices, and providing business transaction management. APM analytics is improving with new tools that can correlate thousands of metrics and identify patterns that provide early warning signs of impending trouble. The appearance of solutions that go beyond real-time monitoring and offer predictive analytics is another new market trend. Enduser experience monitoring is an APM category that focuses on how the user is experiencing performance. For example, green lights might be showing in production but the client side might be dead. This feature now needs to encompass applications running on smart mobile devices. Reporting to smart devices like tablets is also a new must-have. While some APM vendors aim for solutions that cover all monitoring and performance categories for the complete range of users, there are smaller players that are purely focused on operations and production. Ovum finds that the APM field is attracting new entrants with innovative solutions, so despite waves of industry rationalizations that occurred some years ago with all-encompassing solutions, the field is diverging again as more distinctly defined users are identified, such as DevOps, with their specific needs such as continuous deployment. APM in relation to cloud computing is a highly active area of solution enhancement by nearly all the vendors reviewed in this report. While some vendors can offer APM as SaaS, others are waiting to see how this market grows or are busy building such features. Taking APM into the cloud for private clouds is less of an issue than doing so on public clouds where there are limits on what can be deployed. Agents that accompany applications to public clouds is a common approach. APM for cloud service providers is another user category and an essential one as these providers look to differentiate themselves. APM solutions therefore need to keep pace not just with the changing nature of the data center, the transition to cloud services, use of server virtualization, messaging, virtual desktops, and so on, but also the categories of users who will use the performance information. Finally, we note in this report that given these changes taking place the applications can no longer be considered static but rather dynamic. Key messages The broad APM functionalities are converging in a single solution set for covering the data center and private cloud environments, but the key user groups are given targeted information. Ovum (Published 07/2012) Page 2

3 The key APM user groups are systems administrators and operators, application developers, QA, IT service management professionals, and senior managers and executives. APM analytics has become a major concern and active area of innovation, due to the sheer growth of data to be processed. Advanced techniques such as predictive analytics can quickly identify potential problems before they escalate and bring down systems. The cloud is impacting APM in a number of ways, from SaaS APM offerings, to solutions that can accompany applications to public cloud platforms, to tools that seamlessly track transactions across all tiers in a virtualized private cloud environment. Mobile devices are increasingly being used in the enterprise, and APM solutions must be able to monitor end-user experiences and app performance. Mobile devices are also becoming popular for displaying dashboards to APM user groups. The APM market is going through a revitalization as new vendors emerge and new generation solutions appear from established players. Ovum (Published 07/2012) Page 3

4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Summary 1 Catalyst 1 Ovum view 1 Key messages 2 APM Market Developments 7 Market view 7 Technology view 8 APM market trends 11 Solution Guide for APM 17 Competitive landscape 17 General Assessment 20 Capability assessment 20 Vendor Analysis 23 BlueStripe 23 CA Technologies 24 Compuware 27 ExtraHop Networks 28 HP30 IBM 32 itrinegy 34 Nastel Technologies 36 NEC 38 NetScout Systems 40 Netuitive 42 Opsview 44 Ovum (Published 07/2012) Page 4

5 OpTier 46 Quest 48 Appendix 51 APM Features Matrix and Ovum's Weightings 51 Methodology 57 Author 57 Disclaimer 57 Ovum (Published 07/2012) Page 5

6 TABLE OF FIGURES Figure 1: Ovum APM technology stack 10 Figure 2: Ovum Solution Guide for APM 2012: key vendors assessed 18 Figure 3: Ovum Rainbow Map 19 Ovum (Published 07/2012) Page 6

7 APM MARKET DEVELOPMENTS Market view Application performance management (APM) is currently going through a revitalization following cloud and DevOps technology evolutions (possibly revolutions), as well as innovation in areas such as analytics and real-time monitoring, so it is timely to define exactly what is meant by the term APM. Some four years ago the market appeared to be consolidating but the widespread adoption of virtualization and the recognition of the importance of end user-experience monitoring (EUEM) created new opportunities. The APM market today is seeing further diversification, so the modern, broad definition of APM is an application-centric performance monitoring and management solution that cross-cuts IT tiers including network infrastructure, physical and virtual infrastructure (server and OS), storage and databases, end-user experience with edge devices, and integration into general IT service delivery, with these tiers running in and across traditional data centers, cloud environments (private, public, hybrid), and SaaS providers. The modern APM solution is designed to address different IT cultures, their languages (view of the world), and needs. While movements such as Agile and DevOps attempt to break the walls between traditional silos such as development, QA, operations, network engineering, senior management, and others, there remains the need to address the particular information requirements of these communities. APM tools either provide across the board functionality with interfaces targeting the specific communities or they will be solely focused on one or two communities. APM for pre-deployment development and post-deployment troubleshooting therefore provides developers with source-code-level detail and statistics, whereas operationsoriented APM is concerned with live production where operators are concerned with end-user experiences and end-to-end service delivery, but for troubleshooting they only need details to method call levels. From a process viewpoint, operations also want to be able to have the right information that enables them to identify who the best team members are to solve the issue. Furthermore, those in operations care about the resource overheads incurred by deploying APM agents in production, and even low-overhead agents can in sufficient numbers drain production resources and also cause potential perturbations. So the type of solutions these communities want in place can differ markedly. In addition, there are two areas closely related to APM that Ovum believes will see increasing activity within the APM market: application performance testing and application security performance. The former is naturally of interest to QA and testing professionals, and APM tools that target this audience will include synthetic and real-user load-testing. Vendors include CA Ovum (Published 07/2012) Page 7

8 (which recently acquired ITKO, a pioneer in service simulation technology), HP, and IBM (which recently acquired Green Hat, another pioneer in service stubbing and virtualization). The second area, cyber security, has become an application-level concern as enterprise users increasingly work on devices that sit outside the firewall such as web browsers and mobile devices. This is an opportunity for the APM market to address. Finally, specialized APM solutions that target particular enterprise applications are available where the complexity of the application and the criticality to the business demands targeted tooling. GSX Solutions is one example of a company that provides a single software solution for monitoring Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, BlackBerry services, and Lotus software at the same time, using remote agentless technology. Unlike general APM solutions, GSX knows its targeted application deeply and can provide a level of analysis and reporting that administrators of these business applications will find immediately helpful in their daily maintenance activities. Another example is Knoa Software, which provides user experience monitoring and management for enterprise applications such as SAP and Oracle. How end users perform their daily tasks on these systems is not normally tracked unless the application is misbehaving, but Knoa is able to analyze usability performance in order to help users make optimal use of the often-complex application interfaces. Technology view Application performance management solutions on the market vary according to which technology direction the vendor has historically started from, such as applications or network. The technology categories covered by the solutions can therefore be split as follows (see Figure 1): Development-oriented: Root-cause APM satisfying needs of development teams with programming and testing support, through to lifecycle support in production with instrumentation of virtual machines and application servers for optimal code performance. Operations: A growth area with the emergence of DevOps, the tools are designed to be used by sysadmin and operators, talk their language and solve their production environment problems. Network infrastructure: This is network performance management (covering LAN and WAN) rather than APM, but the need for a unified view (application plus network) is leading to integrated solutions with operations performance management. In addition, unified communications (including video and VoIP) lead to increasingly sophisticated Ovum (Published 07/2012) Page 8

9 traffic (including video and voice-over-ip elements) with specialized performancemanagement needs. Business transaction management: Tracking a transaction view, as for example initiated by a business user of a service that crosses multiple applications and services. End-user experience monitoring (EUEM): covering client side, from desktop clients to web browsers and mobile devices. Strictly this covers availability, but aspects of EUEM overlap into website/application analytics and optimal behavior monitoring. Physical, virtual, and dynamic infrastructure, on cloud and traditional data center, including SaaS delivery channels. Storage and database: APM for storage and databases are niche specialist areas. While most APM solutions will provide traffic monitoring for data going in and coming out, only a few will instrument storage/database internals. Executive reporting and dashboards. A solution that provides a high-level dashboard for decision-makers who need easy-to-digest indicators such as traffic lights. Legacy systems, such as mainframes: These are still in use in industries such as financial services, and need to be tied in to ensure performance monitoring continuity. Many solutions simply measure the data going in and data coming out. Innovations in the APM space that cross-cut the above APM categories include: Advanced (Big Data) analytics: This is an increasingly sophisticated sub-topic within APM that aims to deal with the many hundreds of thousands of metrics generating data every second, and making sense of the mountain of data. Techniques tend to be either advanced statistics based, such as those based on correlations, or patternmatching. Always-on APM suitable for production monitoring in contrast with heavier instrumentation for pre-deployment testing and after failure event troubleshooting. End-to-end, 360-degree view solution that integrates many of the APM categories listed above. Increasingly this category also includes coverage of web application performance across geographical divides. Dynamic APM: The rise of new generation technology such as cloud services, virtualization, and messaging, means that applications are dynamic rather than static, and places greater demands on APM solutions to make sense of application behavior. Ovum (Published 07/2012) Page 9

10 Figure 1: Ovum APM technology stack Source: Ovum O V U M Increasing application dynamism needs multi-tier, end-to-end APM Modern multi-tier applications and services built for SOA environments are more dynamic than ever before, and this dynamism falls into three dimensions. First, the infrastructure on which applications run can switch in an instant across different cloud servers and virtual machines. Second, the applications may comprise mashups pulling in data from diverse sources, and rely on multiple and distributed components and services. Finally, applications are delivered faster and deployed more frequently than before with the rise of Agile methodologies, continuous delivery, and DevOps. For example, continuous delivery establishes a deployment pipeline that can trigger a code change to production use in a matter of minutes. All three dimensions demand more from an APM solution. Solution configuration should be easy to keep up with frequent Agile drops, it must recognize a distinct business transaction that cross-cuts multiple IT layers, it must follow a transaction across physical and virtual boundaries, and it needs Ovum (Published 07/2012) Page 10

11 to support the needs of different users from developers needing source code line detail to operators concerned with stability and service delivery in the production environment. User deployment approaches for APM There are various ways in which APM solutions can be deployed, dependent on the needs and roles of the users. The four main communities are operations, development, QA, and IT services management, with perhaps end users forming a new fifth grouping. Increasingly, a unified view that addresses the needs of all these communities is required by businesses that are heavily reliant on IT. APM solutions therefore need to be end-to-end, operating 24x7, and able to pre-empt problems before they escalate. In many businesses, point solutions are often brought in to deal with particular problems. For example, developers may need to instrument a Java Virtual Machine, or operations is finding that it needs to monitor end users that are suffering issues despite the server side apparently functioning normally. The collection of these point solutions cannot solve issues efficiently that transcend any one IT layer. Especially in a large enterprise environment the lack of a unified view can lead to significant time-wasting in resolving issues, but for any business reliant on mission-critical applications a comprehensive APM solution is essential. Another user category that will find APM essential is the cloud or SaaS provider, whose business model is based on a minimum up time with multiple nines reliability. APM market trends APM analytics has reached big data proportions In a large data center an APM solution can generate thousands of metric data points per second. This data avalanche will contain the health information about the IT environment, and the challenge is to manage the sheer scale of this data. One approach is to store it in a data warehouse and process it with sophisticated analytics tools that are designed to deal rapidly with the large volumes. An alternative approach is to treat the problem as Big Data and sample the data in real time. Both approaches have led to innovation in the APM market place. Advanced analytics tools are available to enhance legacy APM solutions A number of technology initiatives have led to a growth in the data generated by APM solutions. These tools are providing end-to-end application and service monitoring, covering every tier from network to business transactions. Also service-oriented architecture, which is not quite as dead as some might believe, results in an increase in data traffic to be monitored. Furthermore, virtualization and cloud computing are creating a dynamic environment with an increase in the complexity of metrics to be monitored. In order to keep pace with the sophistication of the IT Ovum (Published 07/2012) Page 11

12 environment the APM solutions started with static threshold-based monitoring but then progressed to event correlation, dynamic thresholding, and pattern matching. The next step to deal with the data overload problem has been tackled by specialist APM vendors such as NEC and Netuitive whose Predictive Analytics and Masterscope Invariant Analyzer respectively are designed to complement existing APM solutions. These tools are statistics-based and employ self-learning algorithms (using neural networks in the case of Netuitive) that process metric data in real time to make sense of the data avalanche and identify issues that need attention. They are based on multivariate correlation and regression and can also provide forecasts of issues that are likely to escalate and bring systems down. Another analytics approach is that taken by OpTier and Nastel, which have a complex event processing (CEP) engine to process data in real time. An alternative approach is to deploy a network appliance such as ExtraHop, which is passive and can monitor data flow in real time without the need for storage or indexing the data. With networks operating at 10 Gbps and data collections in excess of 100TB per day, many solutions resort to sampling rather than inspecting all the data, whereas a network appliance can deal with all data traffic. A start-up vendor that has just gone live with a new product recently is Boundary, which offers a SaaS solution for APM-related Big Data monitoring, charging users an hourly usage rate. Customers such as GitHub are discovering patterns of traffic at highly detailed granularity, with snapshots that are true real-time, to aggregates that help spot unusual behavior. Boundary stores the data as part of its hosted solution on Big Data databases and is ideal for monitoring in public cloud environments where an appliance is not possible. Leaders in the APM space such as CA, HP, and IBM have also created new-generation predictive analytics engines to complement their existing tools, enabling them to scale up their metricsprocessing capabilities. OpTier is also active in big transaction data processing, helping to capture unstructured data and converting it into structured data. The scale of this issue is fast becoming a Big Data problem, and large data center administrators will need to assess their existing APM solutions when handling these volumes of data. APM on and for the cloud Ovum invited the key report vendors to comment on the future of APM, and in particular what effect cloud (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS) services will have on APM. This section is based on a selection of their responses. APM being offered as SaaS is available from many of the APM vendors, and others are busy enhancing their solutions in the expectation that this market will grow significantly. Ovum (Published 07/2012) Page 12

13 On the question of whether IaaS and PaaS providers should offer an APM solution embedded in their service, IBM feels that customers do not want to deal with multiple APM solutions, but instead prefer one solution that spans cloud, virtual, traditional, and hybrid environments. However, IBM believes that APM as part of a PaaS offering will eventually become a requirement, although there are security considerations to consider, and customers today prefer a single APM solution as mentioned, to span everything. Compuware believes that customers expect APM solutions to be an embedded part of XaaS services, so while the burden is on the service providers to provide proactive APM reporting back to consumers, Compuware also believes that many customers will self-procure APM solutions because it is ultimately their brand and business opportunity, and SLA penalties from the service provider will not mitigate the impact to the business. For IBM, the migration of application workloads to cloud platforms via IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS models means that the APM solution must be able to discover application workloads on private and public clouds, deploy the monitoring solutions to those infrastructures, and be able to send data and alerts back to the monitoring solution. This requires flexible data gathering techniques, such as non-agent application data collection, and the cloud dynamic also requires new ways of visualizing APM data. Therefore a new breed of cloud administrators will require a high-level view of application health and cloud resources consumed, and software application stakeholders need to be concerned with the way application workloads are running in the cloud as much as with user experience. IBM is addressing these issues with its IBM Tivoli SmartCloud offerings. HP sees APM as an integral part of cloud computing, recognizing that the cloud model demands a new mindset about how applications are developed, deployed, monitored, and managed. For example, on the cloud you may be trying to monitor resources you may not own, so it is essential to have rigorous monitoring practices to identify the exact root cause of problems that occur. It can also be very difficult for developers to diagnose and fix cloud-based application issues without performance data and end-user information from IT operations monitoring teams. Compuware believes that enterprise adoption of the cloud as a deployment platform will continue to accelerate. Cloud applications are built from assets provided by publicly shared third-party service providers, private clouds, and data center assets, and increasingly powerful end-user clients. In order to monitor the health of these applications, broad visibility across the application delivery chain is critical, spanning publicly shared third-party services, enterprise private clouds, enterprise data centers, and mobile, tablet, and browser-based clients. There is a general consensus among the APM vendors that XaaS providers will in time be expected by their customers to provide detailed application-performance metrics as part of their Ovum (Published 07/2012) Page 13

14 services. As Netuitive points out, this should ideally be driven by common industry standards, but as Netuitive also warns, it could end up being driven by one or two large vendors such as Microsoft or VMware. Ovum sees Amazon AWS as creating a de facto industry standard in cloud API. This would be an opportunity for Amazon to drive a cloud APM API, but there is no sign of this happening. CA recently commissioned a study that explored the intention of organizations in the medium-tolarge-enterprise market segment it targets, to adopt end-user experience monitoring via SaaS. According to the study, 14% of respondents purchase end-user experience monitoring via SaaS, and this number is expected to increase to 24% within the next two years. CA views SaaS as giving users greater flexibility around budgets for ongoing operations, while removing upfront and capital costs. This increased flexibility also relates to the deployment model. In addition, the speed with which a service can be implemented and the ease with which it can be used is important. Customers want what they want, when they want it, and they only want to pay for what they use if and when they use it. CA has made a strong move to address this market trend by acquiring Watchmouse and rolling out CA APM Cloud Monitor. Similarly, CA believes the advent of the cloud-connected enterprise (CCE) will transform the way in which organizations consume service-assurance solutions because they would typically favor managed services or SaaS. While SaaS-based network/event management solutions are expected to grow rather slowly, APM-as-a-service is quickly becoming a reality, which according to CA is contributing to 9% of the total APM market, and is expected to grow to 17% by Therefore, while there is no significant pressure for network/event management-as-a-service, there is strong pressure for APM-as-a-service. CA believes the long-term future of full-featured APM, not just the remote synthetic monitoring capability, lies with the delivery of a SaaS-based model. CA recognizes that APM for the data center requires a convergence and integration of the various segments that have traditionally been separate disciplines, namely APM, infrastructure management, and services operations, to yield end-to-end APM with comprehensive integration across multiple tiers. However, CA sees the demands of CCE as pulling in the opposite direction, with service providers owning the infrastructure and back-office applications, and enterprise IT owning the differentiating bespoke application logic and the management of the underlying service providers. CA therefore sees the CCE model as creating a convergence challenge that has already been addressed in the data center model. CA has addressed this by offering the same CA APM whether in virtual and cloud environments or non-virtual and data center environments. Quest addresses APM for the cloud by ensuring that its Foglight solution is designed to support both public and private cloud-based architectures. Foglight agents communicate over well-known Ovum (Published 07/2012) Page 14

15 ports as well as data-collection, storage, and sending techniques. However, for cloud environments that are restricted in what they allow, Foglight can function without requiring local agents to collect information. Quest sees APM-as-a-service as gaining in importance over the next two to five years. Foglight is available as a managed service, and Quest is validating the need for a broader cloud-based APM offering for the future. Optier sees the use of APM SaaS as slowly benefiting larger parts of the market. As long as most large enterprises keep many applications off the cloud for various reasons, they will also be slow to adopt APM in the cloud. OpTier's product is already cloud-ready. Its out-of-the-box capabilities help clients plan, migrate, and operate in a cloud environment, as well understand change impact, resource consumption, cost of transactions, and more, to assist with accurate provisioning and chargeback. Optier has no immediate plans for a SaaS offering, but is considering it for the future. SaaS APM does have the advantages of lower costs (pay as you use) and flexibility, and new entrants such as Boundary are pure SaaS offerings. Ovum expects this space to be one of the hottest in APM in the years ahead. APM for mobile devices Smart mobile devices are having an impact on enterprise staff because the consumer-led pattern of adoption is crossing over to the workplace, led by the top C-level executives and by staff on the ground and field. This is affecting the APM market in two ways. First, there is a need for APM solutions to monitor app performance on smart mobile phone and tablet devices, whether through synthetic or real user experience monitoring. It is important here to consider the challenges of monitoring a given app when accessed on different devices at different times. Second, the APM reporting and dashboards need to be geared to deliver performance metrics and results to mobile devices, for both executives and operations administrators. In this review, all the key vendors offer mobile device APM except BlueStripe and Nastel, and all vendors offer a mobile device dashboard, except BlueStripe, Opsview, and Quest, and these vendors are likely to enhance their offerings in these respects in the near future. The extent of coverage of mobile device APM features may be further ahead in some than others. For example, synthetic monitoring may be available, but real-user experience monitoring may not. APM innovation in web performance monitoring Gaining maximum return on investment from an APM solution can require technical expertise to interpret the health reports generated by the solution. If this expertise is in limited supply within the organization this reduces the solution's benefit. A new startup that launched its first product in December 2011 is Lacuna Systems, whose solution Indico, which is designed to be quick to install, Ovum (Published 07/2012) Page 15

16 immediately provides health warnings by targeting a sweet spot in the IT infrastructure. Lacuna believes it has no rivals to compete with, at least not yet. All data centers of any meaningful size make use of application delivery controllers (ADCs) to remove load from web servers, and through which web applications are deployed. The ADC hardware market is essentially ruled by four manufacturers: F5, Cisco, Citrix, and Radware, and these controllers produce a wealth of statistics, such as throughput, volume of connections, and connection rates, grouped by servers and applications. Indico with a single deployment can remotely access ADCs in any number of data centers and can alert issues at an early stage of development before a system goes down. Indico uses its intelligent thresholding technology, leveraging Lacuna s native Big Data analytics engine, to baseline and define normal application performance so as to proactively alert in real time when performance falls outside of expected norms. Ovum (Published 07/2012) Page 16

17 SOLUTION GUIDE FOR APM Competitive landscape Ovum takes a close look at the competitive landscape of relevant technology solutions. The assessment is a quantitative and qualitative representation of Ovum's views and opinions about the competitive APM market environment. The list of included vendors is not intended to be exhaustive, but representative, offering readers an in-depth analysis of the leading vendors in the context of the specific technology area. The final mix of selected vendors provides a good balance between leading established players and newer solutions from smaller vendors. The key vendors included in this solution guide are listed in Figure 2. Of the selected enterprise IT management vendors (BMC, CA, HP, and IBM) only BMC is missing, having pulled out mid-stream. Ovum believes this is because BMC is in the process of launching a new solution and is not yet ready to go public. It is advisable that readers consider other solutions not covered in this report, for example AppDynamics and Splunk, and in the purely APM analytics space Prelert and Boundary (launched during the writing of this report). Ovum asked the reviewed vendors to which segments of the APM coverage areas their solutions were applicable, where the segments were itemized as follows: Business processes (multi-applications/services) Application-level transactions Network infrastructure Performance monitoring and management Performance testing Predictive IT performance analytics Two of the vendors, NEC and Netuitive, offer solely predictive analytics solutions that are designed to work with and require APM solutions in place. For this report these two vendors solutions are considered complementary APM solutions and are not included in the Ovum APM Rainbow Map, but a SWOT analysis is provided. Of the APM vendors reviewed, NetScout and Opsview did not offer performance testing, and BlueStripe and Nastel did not cover network infrastructure, otherwise the vendors covered every Ovum (Published 07/2012) Page 17

18 segment in the above list. Where the above-mentioned vendors do not cover a space they will integrate with third-party solutions. Looking at APM from a TCP/IP layer perspective, the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model defines the abstraction layers of communication systems, where a layer serves the layer above it and is supported by the layer below it. The OSI model is briefly defined as: Application, presentation, session layers: L5-L7 Transport layer (flow control): L4 Network layer (data packets): L3 Data link and physical layer (switches and binary transmission): L1-L2 The APM solutions reviewed all covered L3 to L7, with the exception of Nastel, which used a third party for L4. However, with L1 and L2 this is where the main divide between network performance management and APM occurs, so only some vendors offered solutions here. These were CA, Extrahop, HP, IBM, NetScout, Opsview, and Quest. All the vendors reviewed here offer software APM solutions except ExtraHop, which only provides an appliance (combining software and hardware). NEC and Netuitive provide analytics solutions that are designed to complement APM and other IT management solutions, and are not included in the Ovum APM Rainbow Map, which is designed for full APM solutions. Figure 2: Ovum Solution Guide for APM 2012: key vendors assessed Source: Ovum O V U M Ovum (Published 07/2012) Page 18

19 Figure 3: Ovum Rainbow Map Source: Ovum O V U M Ovum (Published 07/2012) Page 19

20 GENERAL ASSESSMENT Capability assessment The vendor solutions were assessed against a set of broad APM features. Vendors were invited to provide feedback on the structure and content of the features matrix (FM) and were then asked to complete the final version. The weightings that Ovum used in assessing the different sections are revealed in the appendix, and it should be kept in mind that customers will vary with their particular requirements and should not simply select vendors on the basis of the scores achieved in this solution guide. For example, customers may have legacy APM tools in place and may be looking to fill gaps in their coverage. The final scores of the FM were aggregated by section and plotted on a heat-style map, except we refer to it as the Ovum Rainbow Map given that the rainbow sequence of colors are used to rate the scores. The final Rainbow plots are shown in Figures 3 and 4 with the color key shown in Figure 5. In the following sections the broad APM features assessed are described qualitatively. Application performance optimization This is the core of APM, and covers features such as application performance monitoring, and application availability. Ovum weighted two features in particular highly here: the capability to capture all transactions 24x7 end-to-end from browser through web and application tiers to database and back, and to provide deep visibility into transactions down to code level. Application platform coverage This section assesses the platforms covered, in particular whether the solution is applicable to applications in virtualized and cloud environments, and mobile applications. Topology and change impact analysis The auto-discovery of transactions flow topology is considered important, as are dependency mapping and automated features for transaction visualization and bottleneck detection. End-user experience monitoring End-user experience monitoring from the user's perspective, such as from inside the user's browser, is a hot topic in APM. This set of features can also overlap into website usability, such as tracking visitor satisfaction and web page landing statistics. The deep tracking of users optimal Ovum (Published 07/2012) Page 20