Compuware APM
Smarter Application Performance Management for Winning the Big Data Analytics Race

John Van Siclen reflects on his college days where he captained the Princeton Varsity hockey team, “Ice Hockey, much like business, is hard-fought and tough. Having insight on why you aren’t performing optimally is critical to making the necessary adjustments when vital seconds define the line between winning and losing.” In his current role as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Compuware APM, he finds the same challenges to be reverberating in today’s businesses. The performance of apps, and by definition businesses themselves, relies on having actionable insight, based on facts rather than assumptions taking advanced analytics more important than ever before.

Unlocking these insights at a faster rate assists organizations to deliver more value to their customers. Modern Application Performance Management (APM) has become an integral part of big data deployments, especially since these deployments are extremely complex and come laden with hidden costs and require specialized operating skill sets. Headquartered in Michigan, Compuware eliminates these factors from the equation. Compuware APM for Big Data delivers immediate deep visibility and analytics to assist organizations in gaining control over their big data workloads and transactions, even in the most complex environments (Hadoop, NoSQL, Splunk and more.) Designed to be light, smart and proactive, Compuware APM manages the complexity of today’s most challenging web, cloud, mobile, enterprise and big data applications, optimizing and monitoring tens of thousands of customer applications.

The year 2008 heralded disruptions in the way applications were being built, architected and deployed. Sensing the definite need for a new generation of APM to address these myriad disruptive changes, Van Siclen’s focus has helped reshape Compuware’s APM offering from that of a collection of brands— Gomez, dynaTrace and Vantage—into a tightly integrated solution set that brings a new generation of value to customers in minutes. Compuware APM addresses three major cost barriers for its Big Data customers. Van Siclen says: “First, we make teams smarter by pinpointing root cause in minutes instead of hours or days; next, we help the business make the right purchasing decisions by profiling jobs and workloads; and third, we give operations the insight needed to appropriately bill their stakeholders for resources consumed."

Light, smart and proactive, Compuware APM optimizes and monitors tens of thousands of customer applications

Compuware’s capabilities with Splunk highlight the improvements in operational intelligence by feeding third-party analytic solutions with rich detail on every customer interaction. Compuware APM streams insights from the end user experience, from click paths to third-party service calls to backend business transactions, directly into Splunk. Splunk can then delve into the Compuware knowhow to take a deep view of the customer with the application and correlate it with other external business and IT data sources, analyzing long term user and usage trends, patterns of application activity, and forensics.

More than 5,000 customers around the world use Compuware’s new generation APM to manage the complexity of their business critical applications. Compuware’s partnership with Hortonworks, a leading vendor with complete 100 percent open source Apache Hadoop distributions, helps to optimize the performance of Hadoop applications on the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP). Hortonworks’ customers build and run large Hadoop clusters with a significant volume of MapReduce jobs. The integration of Compuware APM with HDP provides the Hadoop community with quicker valuable insights to deliver a richer and more targeted experience to their end users.

“The fact that we’re the only APM solution for Hadoop and have built-in support for all major NoSQL databases including Cassandra, MongoDB, HBase and AWS DynamoDB is not an accident. It is the direct result of our commitment to help big data teams improve performance, gain control, lower

costs and maximize business intelligence and analytics to win the analytics race,” adds Van Siclen.