Compuware, Gomez and the New Application Dynamic: Managing Application Performance in the Internet Era

Transcription

1 Compuware, Gomez and the New Application Dynamic: Managing Application Performance in the Internet Era An ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES (EMA ) White Paper Prepared for Compuware November 2009 IT MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,

2 Table of Contents Executive Summary...1 The New Enterprise/Internet Environment and its Challenges...1 The Importance of User Experience Management...2 Design Requirements for Application Performance in this Brave New World...3 Compuware and Gomez...6 EMA Perspective...7 About Compuware...8 About Gomez...8

3 Executive Summary Application Performance Management (APM) can no longer be understood as a narrow discipline focused only on monitoring enterprise applications in a data center context. This is true in that APM involves detailed insights into infrastructure (both systems and network) as they enable and significantly contribute to the effective monitoring of application services. But it s also true because it increasingly requires Internet awareness to support the growth of Web, Web 2.0, Rich Internet, mobile devices, wireless and other services that can only be effectively captured with instrumentation that includes insights from outside the firewall. As not just e-business, but all businesses and all verticals, become increasingly dependent on Web-based application services for business competitiveness, maintaining an effective balance between enterprise and Internet application performance, including Cloud computing services, represents a significant business advantage. This ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES (EMA ) white paper looks at the environmental requirements and the matching design requirements for capturing real-world application performance interdependencies in this Internet Era. It then assesses Compuware s unified approach to combine enterprise and Internet application performance monitoring for more advanced service management and diagnostics across all sectors of application performance management. The New Enterprise/Internet Environment and its Challenges The new enterprise/internet environment is one of additive management complexity, along with a unique range of options for generating new types of application services and a much richer menu for IT-to-business alignment. While many traditional infrastructure and application investments remain business-critical, an evolving set of Web-focused application types (see Figure 1) is creating new management challenges. This application complexity is mirrored in infrastructure complexity, including a variety of new access types, such as mobile devices, cellular and wireless services, and infrastructure options such as VPNs, MPLS, virtual servers, virtual desktops, and thin clients. What business or IT services are you most concerned with? Select all that apply Web applications (internal) Business applications (CRM, ERP, etc.) Client / server applications Web applications (e-business, e-commerce) Industry specific applications (manufacturing, VoIP / telephony Advanced Web applications (Web 2) Video conferencing SOA Rich media / media streaming / voice on demand IP-TV Other (Please specify) 3% 5% 29% 26% 23% 20% 17% 16% 48% 48% 46% 46% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% % Valid Cases (Mentions / Valid Cases) Figure 1: Application performance management in 2009 requires support for many different application types (Quality of Experience: The Ultimate Collaboration How Real Deployments are Succeeding and Why EMA, January, 2009).

4 And the challenges continue. Given the nature of Web 2.0 applications where various components can combine to support a wide range of transaction types, more and more processing is being driven to the desktop browser which may require support for literally thousands of OS, browser and hardware model combinations. Conversely, Web 2.0 capabilities such as Ajax also require visibility into Web transactions that are not page-based, such as searches on Google searches or other interactions where users don t click through pages but receive information, or entertainment, or other communications while remaining on the same URL. Accelerating trends in infrastructure optimization, such as Cloud computing and virtualization, are also adding to the new dynamic in application performance management. Even without virtualization, changes to the infrastructure have increased by orders of magnitude within the last five years. But virtualization, which goes beyond systems to include network, desktop, applications and other areas, is increasingly requiring real-time awareness across a wide range of sources to understand shifting resource behaviors and configuration interdependencies. Cloud computing is both a catalyst for, and an example of, this trend towards community interdependencies that will require a far more flexible set of insights from outside the firewall than have been available in the past. Another trend that s challenging application performance is the growing nature of business and technology interrelationships across a whole host of partners, supply chains, and service provider types. Cloud computing is both a catalyst for, and an example of, this trend towards community interdependencies that will require a far more flexible set of insights from outside the firewall than have been available in the past. But it should be stressed that these interrelationships exist today for anyone delivering a Web application regardless of Cloud and so have already become pervasive. Just how this information can be prioritized and shared will go beyond technology to require a whole new set of process definitions and best practices to adjust to this very non-linear set of interactions. Managing application performance effectively will therefore demand new levels of versatility in business-to-business and business-to-consumer environments, as well as a wide range of hybrid vertical environments from healthcare, to manufacturing, to financial services, and many others. The Importance of User Experience Management User Experience Management (UEM) is one of the most critical starting points for optimizing performance management strategies across these complex application, infrastructure and community ecosystems. This is because UEM starts with the end user/customer rather than more traditional componentcentric metrics that were easier to measure, but far less relevant in capturing the value and effectiveness of actual application services. User experience is as multi-faceted as the term experience implies, and so indicators such as response time, abandonment rates, and usage-related activity levels all factor into a mix that has traditionally been ignored for simple but often irrelevant availability metrics. UEM is redefining traditional approaches to Service Level Management (SLM) to align with business rather than technology objectives, and as such can become a primary indicator for assessing IT effectiveness, prioritizing and orchestrating triage when problems occur, and providing common ground for the IT and business communities to come together in planning and prioritizing new services. It should 2

5 be no surprise, then, that the value of User Experience Management is seen as growing in importance by both business and IT executives and professionals (Figure 2). And the criticality of UEM is increased dramatically with Web applications because of the complexity of the Web application delivery chain, with ISPs, CDNs and geographic and cultural diversity of customers accessing Web-based services. How would you complete this statement? QoE is becoming Business (38) All Other 5% 11% more important to our organization. 21% more important to our organization. less important to our organization. 2% less important to our organization. 84% neither more nor less important to our organization; it is staying about the same. 77% neither more nor less important to our organization; it is staying about the same. Figure 2: User Experience Management is definitely rising in importance within both the business and IT communities. Design Requirements for Application Performance in this Brave New World Before looking at the design requirements to answer the challenges above, it s worth underscoring the importance of application services in the Internet Era not only for Internet business explicitly, but for all and any verticals where IT services are increasing business or organizational competitiveness. Such business advantages can range from enhancing productivity, to enabling new types of dialog and information sharing among business partners, to enabling new types of market outreach, to supporting far more competitive resourcing through supply chains or other models, to enabling other new ways of doing business including the creation of radically new business models. Next-generation application performance management is the key to open this potential treasure chest of value, and so attention to key design requirements is critical. The list below represents Enterprise Management Associates take on a good checklist to see if your application performance management investments are ready for 2010 and beyond. So, you can ask yourself, are your application performance management investments 1. Dynamic and flexible: To support these business, infrastructure and application complexities, your application performance management solution should be both dynamic and flexible. This is because you will need to capture real-time insights across a wide range of infrastructure and application environments both inside the enterprise and on the Internet. You will also want to analyze performance management trends longer term in order to optimize and improve your environment. 2. Assimilative: An application performance leader in 2010 must be able to assimilate and reconcile many multiple sources from both inside the enterprise and on the Internet into a cohesive set of insights into service impact and this includes inputs from multiple vendors. The notion that you can get everything from a single box or platform has proven, in most cases, to be naïve and ill founded.

6 3. Rich in analytics and diagnostics: An application performance leader in 2010 needs to deliver effective analysis for triage and diagnostics to harvest this rich data and turn it into valuable information. This will require looking at data from many different perspectives, including application flow, infrastructure components, transactions and user experience from both inside and outside the Internet. Look for elegant, well integrated solution sets versus piecemeal monsters that require long laundry lists of new software with often equally long lists of professional services. 4. Capturing actual user experience: The flesh-and-blood realities of human experience transcend any single technical metric, and to some degree will always remain open-ended points of discussion for providers and their customers. But having multiple relevant and accurate insights into the experienced responsiveness of applications is a fundamental first step. EMA believes that User Experience Management will redefine SLM and become more central to BSM and is an essential part of application performance management. Leaders must support instrumentation both inside and outside the firewalls, as well as a mix of synthetic transactions and observed transactions. Figures 3 and 4 show priorities in selecting a wide range of instrumentation types and locations to capture application performance metrics tied to UEM from a variety of objectives and contexts. Which of the following technologies are you using to capture application response times? Select all that apply. End-to-end transactional reconstruction (across network, server, desktop, etc.) 55% Network trace 53% Passive or observed transactions 44% Active or synthetic transactions 34% Transactional replay 29% 0% 20% 40% 60% % Valid Cases (Mentions / Valid Cases) Figure 3: Application Performance Management in the new dynamic requires a wide range of choices for instrumentation Where are your application performance metrics instrumented? Select all that apply. Within applications/ across application components 50% Within / across the data center 42% Network transit end-to-end across the internal network 38% At the end-user workstation / device 33% Network transit end-to-end through the SP cloud At the remote office / location Network transit by segment Instrumented by a service outside of my IT organization 23% 22% 21% 18% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% % Valid Cases (Mentions / Valid Cases) Figure 4: Just as Internet era application performance management requires a wide range of choices in where and how instrumentation occurs.

7 5. Support for a multiplicity of roles: Just as effective application performance management must support a whole host of infrastructure and application types, it should also support a wide range of executives and professionals both across IT and in the business community. In other words, there is a very human face to these challenges, and good solutions recognize that and have reporting and visualization capabilities optimized to far more than a single, niche role. Figure 5 is a useful list of at least some of the key constituencies critical to application performance management in the Internet era. Which of the following groupings best describes your role? (Choose the most relevant answer.) Application manager / application support Network manager / professional / engineer Process management and compliance professional 13% 14% 14% Line of business professional 11% Service manager / service desk 9% Other (Please specify) Application development Performance and capacity management 7% 7% 8% E-commerce or e-business manager / professional On-line Operations 4% 4% Q/A Test Service portfolio manager / planner Data center manager / data center professional 3% 3% 3% People performance professional 1% 0% 5% 10% 15% 20% % Frequency Figure 5: To be effectively business aligned, application performance management solutions must support effective collaboration across a wide variety of roles. 6. Visibility into the impact of changes: This includes the ability to capture the impact of configuration changes which are so often the cause of application service problems. The growing attention to the relationship between change management and performance management is one of the defining indicators of more mature IT organizations. 7. Service impact information: Your application performance solution should be able to support your service management requirements to identify impacted owners, impacted customers, impacted commitments and other ramifications. In this way it provides a critical link to your business planning as well as your more operationally centric performance management objectives such as accelerating triage and diagnostics by prioritizing the impact of performance and availability issues across the application infrastructure.

8 Compuware and Gomez While many in the industry have recognized Compuware as a leader and innovator in application performance management, some of Compuware s unique strengths still remain under appreciated. In part this is because Compuware s capabilities span multiple traditional (though related) markets including both BSM and application management and in part because the full breadth of these capabilities is relatively new to the industry. So in order to appreciate what s new, it s worth looking back to 2007 when Compuware acquired Proxima Technology. With Proxima s business service management capabilities, Compuware got the seeds of a technology that it has since evolved in order to unify and reconcile different sources of information. Compuware Vantage reconciles information from multiple monitoring solutions, as well as other data sources such as CMDBs and business systems, and so can assimilate information such as events, statistics configuration data, application configuration data, user impact data, and UEM information into a single unified set of insights. It brings these sources together through its own service modeling schema. Compuware Vantage can then support knowledge processing through querying, reports and its own performance analytics, which in turn can enable role-sensitive access to information based on the appropriateness and detail required for individual professionals and executives. All this is needed to address virtually all of the criteria for next-generation application performance management listed above. On the other hand, Compuware s leadership in User Experience Management is fairly well established in the industry. Compuware grew its core capabilities for application performance management with a full recognition of the need to combine flow-based data gathered through the network, with data center-centric systems components, and then correlate all this with transaction-sensitive information native to individual application architectures. Through this foundation, Compuware supports both Web and client-server applications, and already offered the richest mix of synthetic and observed transactional analysis in the industry even prior to the Gomez acquisition. Compuware supports both Web and client-server applications, and already offered the richest mix of synthetic and observed transactional analysis in the industry even prior to the Gomez acquisition. By combining with Gomez SaaS capabilities, Compuware has considerably strengthened its hand in a number of areas. These include: A unique offering that can intermix insights from inside and outside the firewall, gathered through Gomez s SaaS offerings, which include more than 100,000 consumer-grade testing locations resident in 168 countries covering 2,500 local and major ISPs. The combination greatly enhances Compuware s ability to reach out to Internet and mobile users. Gomez now supports more than 5,000 different mobile devices, with integrated insights into mobile and fixed Web application performance. Gomez also supports detailed insights into browser-based performance across more than 500 combinations of browser and OS types. Gomez capabilities extend to support abandonment rates, load testing, competitive insights, and Web 2.0 same-page monitoring to provide strong support for e-business and e-commerce environments.

9 Gomez reporting will broaden and strengthen Compuware s core operational strengths in rolerelated support, with added reports and analysis targeted at application developers, Q/A Test, service desk professionals, service portfolio planners, IT executives, business executives, on-line operations, and business planners, among others. This versatility in role-based support and the breadth of insight outside the firewall can naturally extend to support entire communities of service providers, partners and supply chains that are becoming more and more fundamental to many businesses and organizations including many that are not strictly Internet-based businesses. This breadth of support includes any number of Cloud computing options all of which will require wide-ranging, versatile monitoring both across the Internet and internal to many enterprises where hybrid, versus purely Cloud-based, applications will become the core growth opportunity. The commitment to deliver on the values of this integration was underscored when just days after the acquisition closed, Compuware/Gomez announced its Phase 1 Vantage/Gomez integration, which is designed for fast root cause drilldown as integrated across both internal and Internet environments. Also announced was a transponder to support open SNMP-based integration between third-party monitoring tools and Gomez services. Together, these make a strong statement about ongoing commitments to integration, openness and modularity across the combined Vantage/Gomez solution set. EMA Perspective It would seem to be a statement of fact rather than opinion that at present, no vendor can equal Compuware in well integrated capabilities for monitoring application performance both inside and outside the firewall. This includes User Experience Management, triage, as well as in-depth diagnostics. Compuware s assimilative capability is also distinctive in its clear focus on application and service performance, and as such it becomes a fundamental building block to enabling insights from a breadth of sources including monitoring and instrumentation both from Compuware and from other vendors. It would seem to be a statement of fact rather than opinion that at present, no vendor can equal Compuware in well integrated capabilities for monitoring application performance both inside and outside the firewall. But no vendor can or should try to offer everything. Compuware s investments are still operationscentric with a strong tie to the executive and business communities which represent an area of growth for Compuware. Similarly, Compuware Vantage plus Gomez is a natural complement to more service desk-centric investments, including workflow and process automation, service portfolio planning, infrastructure optimization and application lifecycle management from a dollars-and-cents perspective, along with Line-of-Business and e-commerce executives and professionals. It should also be stressed that Compuware s offerings are complementary to strong CMDB and CMS initiatives where configuration and application interdependency information can be assimilated and analyzed through Compuware s BSM-related technologies. Understanding Compuware (Vantage plus Gomez) in context with your broader management ecosystem should, in the end, make it even more attractive as a critical and well-designed BSM building block. Compuware is well architected to participate actively in a reconciled strategy for managing service

10 and infrastructure performance and change. Through its combination of assimilation, integration, analytics, instrumentation and breadth of insight, Compuware can bring unique and distinctive values to application performance management in many ways that no other company in the management marketplace currently can. About Compuware Founded in 1973, Compuware provides software, experts and best practices to ensure applications work well and deliver business value. Compuware solutions optimize application performance across the Enterprise and the Internet for leading businesses around the world, including 46 of the top 50 Fortune 500 companies and 12 of the top 20 most visited U.S. web sites. Learn more at: About Gomez Gomez, the Web performance division of Compuware, provides the industry s leading platform of Web application experience management solutions used by organizations to optimize the performance, availability, and quality of their Web and mobile applications and proactively identify business-impacting issues. The on-demand Gomez platform integrates solutions for Web load testing, Web performance management, cross-browser testing, and Web performance business analysis that test and measure Web and mobile applications from the outside-in across all users, browsers, devices, and geographies using a global network of over 100,000 locations. Over 2,500 customers worldwide, ranging from small companies to large enterprises including 12 of the top 20 most visited US Web sites use Gomez solutions to increase revenue, build brand loyalty, and decrease costs.

11 About Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. Founded in 1996, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is a leading industry analyst firm that specializes in going beyond the surface to provide deep insight across the full spectrum of IT management technologies. EMA analysts leverage a unique combination of practical experience, insight into industry best practices, and in-depth knowledge of current and planned vendor solutions to help its clients achieve their goals. Learn more about EMA research, analysis, and consulting services for enterprise IT professionals and IT vendors at or follow EMA on Twitter. This report in whole or in part may not be duplicated, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or retransmitted without prior written permission of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All opinions and estimates herein constitute our judgement as of this date and are subject to change without notice. Product names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies. EMA and Enterprise Management Associates are trademarks of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. in the United States and other countries. EMA, ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES, and the mobius symbol are registered trademarks or common-law trademarks of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. Corporate Headquarters: 5777 Central Avenue, Suite 105 Boulder, CO Phone: Fax: