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Compuware Corp. this week at Microsoft Corp.s TechEd conference in New Orleans will jump into the management void for Microsoft .Net Web services software.
The Farmington Hills, Mich., management software provider will announce a new release of its Vantage application performance management suite, which extends a handful of management capabilities to .Net applications.
Vantage 8.0, which includes Application Expert, ClientVantage, Application Vantage, NetworkVantage, ServerVantage and Predictor, extends to .Net the ability to profile and analyze application response times, monitor performance, trouble-shoot faults and manage growth.
ClientVantage, for example, allows users to passively monitor transaction response times and actively test and measure those times using synthetic transactions, according to Jay Richards, who heads Compuwares .Net management efforts.
“The big challenge for .Net is knowing where the Web services are going to be,” Richards said. “For example, by the time youve verified a credit card, you might hit two or three different Web services, and you dont know where those are located. The end users dont want to have to know that. They just want to see what kind of response times they are getting.”
Although Compuwares support is a start, theres a long way to go before solid management support is available for .Net services, said Jeb Bolding, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates Inc., in Boulder, Colo.
“I think Web services now are focused on internal development. The issue of manageability isnt as big behind your own firewall,” Bolding said. “People are aware of what can happen if they try to do that kind of integration with business partners across the Internet.”
Compuware also extended the real-time packet capture and diagnosis of its Application Vantage tool, which can automatically trace a transaction when it exceeds a certain performance threshold. In addition, the tool now includes new decodes for XML and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) transactions.
Compuwares NetworkVantage was enhanced to identify SOAP and HTTP Secure traffic.
Compuware built into its ServerVantage server performance management tool pre-defined monitoring counters and metrics that provide a base level of performance and availability information. The counters are implemented as templates that draw from Microsoft tuning and performance guides for .Net servers.
The templates include rules or monitoring thresholds as well as recommendations.
“They say things like, If you see these two metrics exceed these particular values, then you need to send an alert. Its an indication that something is wrong with performance,” Richards said.
The components of the Vantage 8.0 suite are due by the end of the month.
