News
App Performance Management Vendor Bets on .NET
- By Scott Bekker
- April 10, 2002
NEW ORLEANS -- At a stage in the Web services lifecycle where the early adopters are the developers experimenting with the services, at least one vendor is charging way ahead and integrating support for the technology deep into a product aimed at infrastructure administrators.
By the end of the month, Compuware Corp. will deliver its application performance monitoring tool suite Vantage 8.0. Four of the six components of the suite are already shipping and two others are in the advanced stages of beta testing, company officials say.
The key enhancement for the 8.0 release is the ability to monitor performance of .NET Web services-based applications right down to their SOAP and XML payloads.
"I don't think there are too many folks out there who have hit .NET at this level. I don't know that the production deployments are that high," says Steve Dykstra, Vantage product manager for the $2-billion a year software and professional services company. "They're all interested that you're going to have it [support for .NET]."
It's often difficult to figure out where a problem such as a performance slowdown lies with a traditional network application -- in the wire, at the server, in the database, in the application or at the client. The distributed nature of XML Web service-based applications will make it even harder to pin down performance bottlenecks.
Compuware is betting that demand will build among system and network administrators for application performance monitoring tools once those highly distributed applications begin to emerge, and the company is jockeying for first-mover advantage.
Suite components available now are ClientVantage, NetworkVantage, ServerVantage and Application Vantage. Application Expert and Predictor will be available by the end of the month. Starting prices for the suite components range from $25,000 to $35,000.
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.