In this week’s application performance management series we solicit feedback from Compuware customers about their experiences with the Vantage product lineup. Through aggressive acquisition, Compuware has assembled the requisite components to position itself against the “big four” management vendors—IBM, CA, BMC, and HP. Of the many management components Compuware offers, its ClientVantage, ApplicationVantage, and Vantage Analyzer provide application performance management.
ClientVantage is a user experience monitoring tool that either simulates the user experience using synthetic transactions or monitors the actual user experience with passive probes at the data center. It uses dedicated workstations to simulate user transactions, measure the resulting response times, and compare results against thresholds. The passive probe technology, acquired from Adlex in 2005, measures the application response times experienced by every user of every application anywhere in the network. Compuware tells us that its passive probe technology is the biggest draw for ClientVantage sales.
ApplicationVantage is an off-line analysis tool that allows you not only to troubleshoot application performance problems, but also to model the effects of corrective actions to see if a proposed solution will do the trick. ApplicationVantage is used in production as well as pre-production environments to compare a “problem” trace with a trace that is known to be good, and suggests possible causes and solutions to problems.
Vantage Analyzer is Compuware’s J2EE and .NET performance monitoring and analysis tool, which helps troubleshoot and anticipate J2EE and .NET performance problems.
Compuware is no Johnny-come-lately. In business since 1973, it now has about 7000 employees and annual revenues of approximately $1.25B. Compuware has big aspirations for competing against the “big four”, and predicts that it will raise the count to the “big five” as it succeeds in making inroads against the bigger management platform vendors.
If you have deployed Compuware’s Vantage products, tell us what you think. Do they live up to your expectations? What were your impressions? A simple "I like it", "I have mixed feelings", or "I hate it" response is fine—but if you have insight to share with the community, then talk all you want. You can post a reply to this blog using your name or anonymously.
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Great experience with Vantage
About three and a half years ago, we conducted a RFP for application monitoring that pulled in the top ten vendors in that space. After a lengthy process involving five on-site POCs, we decided to go with Compuware Vantage for our enterprise solution. Truthfully, we were rather surprised with that decision being that Compuware didn't have a high standing going into the process. But once we got their tools in house for a POC, we were surprised with their price and performance. Now that we've had extensive experience under our belts with Vantage, we're very happy with that decision.
Vantage Analyzer has been key in identifying Java and .NET problems which have resulted in significant financial savings. One example was the quick identification of a single method which was chewing up CPU. The usage patterns of the application had changed which resulted in a method that had been there for years started to act differently. Without Vantage, we would have been rolling back change after change -- all in the hope of finding the problem. Instead, we were able to find the issue in under an hour.
Specifically Vantage Analyzer is unique in its ability to be run in both prod and non-prod settings, its ability to break down method time by time spent in the CPU, time spent waiting, and time spent on a socket. For memory analysis it can show what methods created which objects and then drill backwards (show me the biggest or oldest objects and what methods created them).
Client Vantage Agentless is really the flagship product of Compuware right now. We used similar products and nothing can handle the volume that Compuware can. We run close to 300 million transactions through it every day and get tons of statistics on real end user experience. We've also used it heavily in the back-ends by decoding XML and SOAP calls between the tiers in order to manage our back-end services.
We've also been very happy with how quickly Compuware matures their products. We've seen significant feature upgrades coming out about every six months. Their local engineers are great and their support staff is good too.
Probably the only drawback to their tools could be summed up by saying that they are high end tools meant to be used by high end people. Setting up and using Client Vantage Agentless will be difficult for techies with only basic networking skills. Using the data from Vantage Analyzer to find your problems requires a strong analytical background. But if you have the right people, these are definitely the right tools for them.
Excellent Tool
Client Vantage Agentless is an excellent tool. We installed the product in June 2008 and gained immediate payback. The tool is extremely intuitive to use even for management staff. We tried other tools, but found them extremely difficult to maintain and required a high level of technical experience to use. Since our initial purchase, we added the database analyzer to monitor end user queries against our Oracle databases. We also purchased the tool to monitor access and use of high valued assets within our organization.
Compuware delivered on everything and we have even found some uses not even intended by this product.
Application Vantage
We have used Application Vantage for nearly 8 years, and it has been very valuable in answering that age-old question "why is my application so slow over a network link?" It is truly a "sniffer on steroids" that can slice and dice the data a number of ways, giving excellent graphical representations of the tasks. Anytime you put an ocean between the users and servers and you have performance issues, and all your typical infrastructure health indicators show green, AppVantage can help you find the smoking gun.
Agentless End-to-End
We recently deployed the Compuware Vantage Agentless product for a customer(global Airline) and the product has exceeded our expectations, as well as the customer. The End-to-End measurement project has been an on going chapter in our relationship with the customer. Various changes in Project managers, as well as tests of various products finally lead us on the right path to Vantage Agentless.
We were looking for a solution that would be as intrusive as possible, while giving us the "whole" picture of an end-to-end transaction. The Vantage product has been very easy to deploy and the maintenance of the product is very minimal. Good reporting tools were very critical for us, and the Data Mining Interface that is standard with the tool has meet our expectations.
Our customer is extremely happy with the reports that are available on-line, and together we're able to trouble shoot long response times.
Another positive feature of the product is the possibility for us to monitor over 100 applications without having to deal with licensing issues.
We're looking forward to expanding our usage of the other Vantage products, which will give us the ability to resolve problems much quicker(proactively of course) when they do occur.
I would recommend the Vantage Agentless product to any enterprise looking to control and monitor applications.
We recently deployed the
We recently deployed the Compuware Vantage Agentless product for a customer(global Airline) and the product has exceeded our expectations, as well as the customer. The End-to-End measurement project has been an on going chapter in our relationship with the customer. Various changes in Project managers, as well as tests of various products finally lead us on the right path to Vantage Agentless.
We were looking for a solution that would be as unobtrusive as possible, while giving us the "whole" picture of an end-to-end transaction. The Vantage product has been very easy to deploy and the maintenance of the product is very minimal. Good reporting tools were very critical for us, and the Data Mining Interface that is standard with the tool has meet our expectations.
Our customer is extremely happy with the reports that are available on-line, and together we're able to trouble shoot long response times.
Another positive feature of the product is the possibility for us to monitor over 100 applications without having to deal with licensing issues.
We're looking forward to expanding our usage of the other Vantage products, which will give us the ability to resolve problems much quicker(proactively of course) when they do occur.
I would recommend the Vantage Agentless product to any enterprise looking to control and monitor applications.
Comments on Application Vantage and Vantage Agentless
Our company makes heavy use of two Vantage products, Application Vantage and Vantage Agentless monitoring.
We have used Application Vantage since it was acquired by Compuware years ago from Optimal. It is a very strong network analysis tool and is used in all of our pre-production application QA testing. It is also used by our network operations group to troubleshoot. It has been used countless times in the past to find and isolate issues in both pre-production and production and is a very valued tool in our organization.
We are newer customers of Vantage Agentless but it has also quickly become a highly valued tool. I agree with some of the previous posts that it is very complex to setup, but once it is in place it provides invaluable data about the end user experience. We use this data in tandem with a synthetic monitor to provide a complete picture of application availability and performance from the end-user perspective.
Although I am very positive about the functionality and usefulness of the tools above, I feel it is also worth mentioning that Compuware support leaves much to be desired. We frequently have open tickets go un-addressed for days (sometimes weeks) and there are no available online tools for case tracking. Standard support hours realistically seem to be M-F, 8-5 Eastern. Also, with Vantage Agentless support in particular, the second level support is in Poland so it generally takes at least 24 hours to get an answer on anything due to time zone differences. We have pointed out these issues and more several times to our local resources, but have really seen no noticeable change.
The Vantage Analysis Server
The Vantage Analysis Server (VAS) is one of the best monitoring tools out there that I've known. The VAS is easy to setup and configure. Its baseline report is execellent and straight forward. We're having the VAS for about a year and so far we really like this product. Their support team is awesome. Thanks to Compuware.
Amazing Visibility with Vantage Analyzer
We have Vantage Analyzer deployed in our Test, Dev and Prod environments and it has given us amazing visibility into our application performance. We have a mix of Java and .NET apps on several different platforms including AIX and Webshpere and Windows. As a company that develops applications for subsidiaries we are constantly working on improving our current SLA's and meeting and exceeding expectations of our end-users. One example of how Vantage Analyzer has helped us includes a .NET app we developed. We saw slow repsonse times with page generation which originally led us down several paths for troubleshooting, once we looked at the tranactions calls for Methods and SQL queries we identifed a stored procedure that we were calling more often than needed, this was causing a chain reaction in the performance and resource utilization. Once we changed this we saw system memory, CPU and overall end-to-end transactional performance increase beyond expectation. This saved us a great deal of time and money rebuilding and re-specing what was already very adequate hardware resources. Another example includes how the developement effort is enhanced by being able to see the method and SQL calls perform as an applciation is being devleloped; this too has been a great insight for our company.
The support staff is excellent, knowledgeable and very helpful. Also the tools intergarate well with eachother, we use Agentless Monitoring and Application Vantage and are in the proccess of utilizing the built-in functionality to integrate the tools together so we can access a transaction for example in Vantage analyzer and drill into the transactional data gathered for the same application in Agentless Monitoring or Application Vantage.
I would highly recomend this suite of products to anyone who is looking to get low-evel visibility and insight to see how transactions are performing from end-to-end.
Client Vantage Agentless
We began evaluating the Compuware Vantage Agentless tool in January of 2008. It was very easy to install and provided insight into our enterprise WAN environment immediately. With over 500 remote locations across the CONUS and limited network capacity to each of these sites our ability to measure E2E performance and capacity is critical to our IT team and its ability to meet business service and performance requirements. The DMI reporting tool is highly configurable and was able to answer application performance and WAN capacity questions with ease. Over time this tool has helped us identify key application performance metrics, and unwanted application traffic which we then eliminate from our WAN circuits and sites increasing overall service availability and quality.
The local Compuware team was highly skilled and well motivated to assist us in our evaluation and eventual production implementation of the tool. Their prompt assistance and holistic support greatly assisted in our success in designing and deploying our enterprise dashboard that is now a core monitoring and performance component in our environment.
We found measurable value from week one and continue to find value in our ability to identify problem areas in our application delivery as well as smart targeted capital investment in network and application resources.
The Compuware Vantage Agentless is the “go to” tool for E2E performance and capacity metrics in our enterprise.