App performance in show spotlight

A handful of vendors are scheduled to air products this week designed to give companies a better read on application performance by aggregating network and system management data.

BMC Software, Compuware, NetScout and newcomer Ipsum Networks  are among the vendors responding to customers who are increasingly focused on business impact management - that is, the idea of paying more attention to overall application performance than to the assorted piece parts of a network. Many of the products will be introduced at the ComNet Conference & Expo in Washington, D.C.

"The whole orientation has changed in the past few years," says Frank Petersmark, vice president of IT and CIO at Amerisure Mutual Insurance, a Farmington Hills, Mich., company with a network of about 700 managed nodes across 10 locations.

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A handful of vendors are scheduled to air products this week designed to give companies a better read on application performance by aggregating network and system management data.

BMC Software, Compuware, NetScout and newcomer Ipsum Networks  are among the vendors responding to customers who are increasingly focused on business impact management - that is, the idea of paying more attention to overall application performance than to the assorted piece parts of a network. Many of the products will be introduced at the ComNet Conference & Expo in Washington, D.C.

"The whole orientation has changed in the past few years," says Frank Petersmark, vice president of IT and CIO at Amerisure Mutual Insurance, a Farmington Hills, Mich., company with a network of about 700 managed nodes across 10 locations.

"Everything we do is from an application perspective. Infrastructure is . . . not the thing running the business. The real juice is in the applications," he says.

Mark Ehr, a senior analyst with Enterprise Management Associates, says he has heard similar sentiments from his clients.

"Companies understand now that spotting application problems early will help the bottom line, and they need easier ways to do it," he says.

Compuware will try to do its part by releasing a more comprehensive and scalable version of its Vantage network, server and application monitoring software. The company integrated the separate software packages within the suite and created a Web-based graphical user interface to more quickly generate reports. The interface in Version 8.5, called VantageView, works across the suite's components, enabling network managers to log on to any workstation and access, say, the Network Vantage application to check.

"People no longer want to have to load a fat client on a machine to get a look at how things are doing," Ehr says of the package, which starts at $19,000.

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Separately, BMC will introduce a product that combines fault and performance management collection with network discovery and network traffic flow information.

The company says its Patrol Visualis Fault Manager can correlate network device status, for example, with application response time. Patrol agents reside on servers, databases and network devices. A centralized management console now can accept information from several sources and includes a correlation engine to show how events across a network affect application performance.

"By allowing data to be shared by management applications, including, I hate to say, competitors' apps, the software will take events from anywhere and help the network folks trying to get a handle on poor-performing applications," says Gerry Roy, a product manager for the new software, which starts at $40,000.

NetScout this week will introduce its nGenius Gigabit Ethernet over Copper Probes, devices that connect to switches and report on the traffic traveling through LAN and WAN links. And now, nGenius software can generate reports on bandwidth use, throughput and application response times across several links in one Web-based view. The probes come in two-, four- or eight-port configurations and start at about $22,000.