Compuware's Vantage product focuses upon combining robust network and server OS infrastructure monitoring with APM functionality. The weakness of the Windows product is twofold; since the product relies upon scripts to measure transaction response time, it suffers from all of the limitations and maintenance pains that go along with scripts, and since the product does not drill down into the application layer of either packaged application or custom applications, it cannot associate true root cause information with the degradation in response times. However, the new Vantage Analyzer for J2EE does not suffer from these weaknesses and should be considered when looking at J2EE specific products like those from Wily and Veritas/Symantec.
The key reasons to consider this product are:
- You do not already have one of the major infrastructure monitoring solutions from Microsoft, BMC, NetIQ, HP, IBM or CA and would like to start with one that has some APM flavor to it.
- Your Windows applications environment consists mainly of packaged applications for which you can write scripts and maintain them.
- Your J2EE applications are in house developed so that you can use the detailed information provided by the Vantage Analyzer for J2EE to resolve code level issues..
The position of this product relative to other products you might consider is:
- Unlike most infrastructure monitoring tools Vantage contains the ability to measure response time and to correlate response time degradation with network or server utilization issues.
- Unlike many smaller APM vendors, Compuware is a large publicly traded company with substantial financial and people resources.
The issues or concerns that you should be aware of when choosing this product are:
- The Vantage Vantage Analyzer contains support to drill down into J2EE. However a similar capability is not available for COM+/.Net.
