The highlights of Compuware’s application performance management (APM) Spring 2012 Platform Release includes a consolidation of functions in its traditional Vantage data center products, and a realignment of branding that highlights Compuware's relatively recent Gomez and DynaTrace acquisitions...

The topic of this article is upgrading to the 2012 release of SCOM for current SCOM 2007 R2 users. Because upgrading to a new version of SCOM is going to take some work, you want to know if it’s going to be worth the effort...

Compuware announced a deep transaction management solution for dynamic cloud and Big Data applications. With dynaTrace Enterprise, EC2 and Azure cloud applications as well as Cassandra and Hadoop Big Data applications can be easily...

Big Data applications suffer from many of the performance challenges and bottlenecks that plague current distributed applications, though the volume of performance data can be much larger, making troubleshooting all the more challenging. To facilitate speed and real-time results, a new approach to application performance management (APM) is required to support massively scalable architectures and dynamic, elastic resource allocation...

To make application software faster we need to combine and apply all four of the above strategies but not within different phases in the application lifecycle, not at different places in the application architecture, not at a particular (static or reference) point in time, not with an expected performance model in mind. No these strategies needs to be applied all the time and just in time by the software itself (in parallel)...

It is thus difficult to pinpoint the root cause of a performance problem, whether it is network-, database- or code-related. However, when combining the strengths of APM with user-defined transaction profiling, something truly special happens – the ability to monitor the end-user experience (EUE) from the user actions over the network, to the low level back-end calls that make up a BT...

Application performance management is a priority for IT staff in 2012 as end user numbers grow and demand for better services shoots up. However, research by Quocirca has shown that IT executives, particularly CIOs, are not confident that they will be able to meet increasing user demand...

When it comes to the impact of storage on virtualization projects, IT administrators are more concerned about performance issues and less about cost than they were a year ago, according to the ‘2012 State of the Private Cloud Survey’ by DataCore Software. DataCore’s survey, which received responses from 289 IT administrators worldwide, revealed that 63 percent of respondents consider system downtime and slow application performance to be their primary storage-related virtualization concerns, up from 36 percent in 2011...

System performance is dependent upon the various components, software and applications that make up a system. When the system's components properly relate to one another, they then make a tightly integrated solution more plausible. Like in MTBF (mean time before failure), system performance is only as good as its weakest link; if one component performs poorly, the overall system is then dragged down to that lowest common denominator...

A research report by analyst firm Quocirca has named 2012 the 'Year of APM' [application performance management]. That's based on a survey of 500 senior IT and business leaders who were asked which initiatives have the highest priority. Respondents were asked to rank 15 initiatives in terms of prioritization; application performance management (APM) came out on top by a considerable margin, beating private cloud, virtualization, customer-facing applications and public cloud - among others - to the top spot...

Traditionally, organizations could get away with not having an APM tool. But as organizations begin to move enterprise applications to the cloud – the public cloud, in particular – the need for a tool that monitors and manages the performance and availability of applications becomes a must-have. Meanwhile, organizations that use APM tools for on-premise applications are finding themselves re-evaluating the tools they’ve invested in...

System downtime and slow application performance related to storage in virtualized environments are the primary concerns of IT administrators surveyed in a new report on the state of private clouds....

Because it leverages advanced pattern detection algorithms, Prelert is more likely to catch the early warning signs of an impending performance incident. Here's how it works.  

Most predictive analytics packages rely on regression analysis to look at trending metrics and project a future event.  Of course this works best when there is a steady progressive increase or decrease in a metric that can easily be extrapolated to a future threshold.

Prelert, on the other hand, learns the normal patterns of activity in a monitored environment and uses a 'heat map' dashboard to highlight anomalies in those patterns.  In nearly ...

Many are lagging in transitioning their tier 1 applications—the mission-critical apps that could benefit the most from virtualization.

"What we find is that customers virtualize anywhere from 40 to 60 percent of their estate before they come to their business critical apps," says Parag Patel, vice president of alliances at VMware, though he notes that the majority of VMware customers are well over 50 percent virtualized at this point...

"Besides testing the cloud infrastructure for security, scalability and performance, enterprises also seek insights into the performance of applications hosted in the cloud environment, " said Frost & Sullivan Senior Research Analyst Srihari Padmanabhan. "Service providers, enterprise organizations and network engineers need to understand the root cause of faults in the network by gaining end-to-end visibility across the cloud, giving numerous opportunities for application monitoring as well."…