Keeping a telework initiative running smoothly is an ongoing effort. One IT aspect that's important to monitor is the performance of remote workers' systems. If performance is poor, productivity suffers.

Application management software can help. Compuware recently unveiled the latest version of its Vantage application management suite, which is aimed at helping companies glean better performance from their applications.

"Vantage is focused on understanding the level of service delivered from an IT organization to end users, and then helping the IT organization solve performance problems once they become aware of them," says Lloyd Bloom, senior product manager at Compuware. "The purpose of Vantage 9.8 is two-fold. First, to do a better job of measuring user experience. And second, to provide better diagnostics at the back end."

Vantage 9.8 features new monitoring mechanisms as well as greater support for J2EE analysis. In particular, the ability to more easily monitor end-user experience can be useful for supporting teleworkers. The new version of Compuware's suite supports agent-less monitoring, which lets IT staff keep tabs on the kind of performance external Web users - such as home workers - are experiencing, without requiring those users to have preinstalled agents on their workstations.

The new monitoring capabilities are based on technology Compuware gained in its acquisition of Adlex earlier this year. Adlex has an appliance that sits in front of a Web server farm to gauge users' application experiences and provide detailed performance analysis behind the scenes, Bloom says. "You can see everything that users are doing at all hours, and for all the applications that are being monitored," he says.

Compuware also added tools for better diagnosing Java problems that can bog down business applications - and stall local and remote workers' ability to get their work done. With the addition of more granular J2EE performance analysis tools, IT can drill down into a transaction to determine whether a slow JSP page is CPU- or code-intensive, running low on memory, or waiting on back-end server processing, for example.

When there's a service delivery problem, IT can see on the Vantage dashboard what changed and whether application or system infrastructure changes caused the problem.