Integrations

Product Description

IT administrators and operations managers face an increasingly difficult challenge ensuring applications are available and perform at acceptable levels. Systems and applications are more complex, users more demanding. ClientVantage provides an alternative to hit-or-miss methods by getting to the right information automatically. It provides diagnostic data to narrow down the cause of application performance problems so IT teams know where to look, even before problems affect end users.

ClientVantage offers two proven methods that address different types of end-user monitoring needs. These methods are complementary and are often used in combination with each other and other Vantage solutions:

1. Agentless monitoring measures the application response times experienced by every user of every application. It passively collects data from anywhere in your network from an easy-to-maintain centralized location.
2. Active monitoring lets you gauge the response times for key business applications against established thresholds using dedicated workstations that replay scripted transactions or scriptless application measurements. Active agents represent predictable users in a known environment performing measurements at scheduled intervals, therefore, providing "control" measurements.

Integration Overview

Tideway Foundation is able to produce accurate application models based upon network communications. In Web services environments much of the network communications occurs via transient (non-persistent) connections which are difficult to track using an active discovery method.

Compuware's ClientVantage Agentless Monitoring tool uses passive monitoring techniques to listen for and identify network traffic. The identification of this network traffic (including IP addresses and port numbers) is the information needed by Foundation to identify and model software and business services.

The integration that has been developed takes network traffic detail from the ClientVantage and generates a flat file. The flat file is imported into Tideway Foundation using a network connection adapter. Tideway wrote a ClientVantage Agentless driver for this adapter to facilitate the integration.

Once the connection detail is imported, internal processes are run to link those network connections to known software components within the Tideway model. The end result provides a complete picture of the Web Services environments with little or no effort from the customer because it is being modeled on actual traffic. Typically in web services environments dependency mapping has to depend on configuration parameters to identify how components communicate since periodic discovery does not see all of the network connections. This is a difficult and time-consuming way to model such services.

Benefits

There are numerous value-adds to this integration:

• Significantly extends Foundation's ability to automatically discover and model dynamic Web services environments.
• Will allow for more autonomous deployments, meaning that the customer will not have to detail as much about their environment before discovery is run.
• As the ClientVantage Agentless solution is being integrated with NetworkVantage, this will give Foundation all of the discovery depth of nLayers in an infinitely more scalable architecture. This is because NetworkVantage is a fully functional passive discovery engine, capable of recognizing a wider array of application types than the ClientVantage Agentless probe.
• It allows customers to use a single passive monitoring tool for two purposes; performance monitoring and application discovery.
• This integration will also increase the value of the other Tideway Foundation and Vantage Service Manager. With both integrations, the Vantage tools will be collecting performance and network connection data and feeding it into Foundation which will be building the business model. Then Foundation will export the business model to Vantage Service Manager. With these integrations the entire process of feeding each tool can become seamless, allowing the business model to change dynamically based upon the ongoing passive and active discovery being provided by our two products.
• The overall functionality of the combined solutions exceeds any within Tideway's market space.
• Because the Vantage tools are software-based, they could be used as an extension of Foundation and deployed in specific locations where such traffic collection would help build the model. This is a significant shift from the nLayers approach, which requires passive discovery throughout an infrastructure.

System Requirements

The following Tideway and Compuware products must be installed and operating correctly:

Compuware product requirement

• Compuware ClientVantage Agent-less Monitoring Device (AMD) and Vantage Analysis Server (VAS)

Tideway product requirements

• Tideway Foundation 6.3

Implementation

Currently not productized, this integration can be implemented on a per-request basis. If you need it for proof of concepts, send a request to Emmanuel Marchal

Performance

No performance benchmark is currently available

Open Issues

For the complete list of known issues, please refer to Salesforce cases.

Marketing and Sales Collaterals

• Joint Value Proposition Headline: Automating Application Discovery for Transient Application Environments

no other collateral currently available

Contact information

For additional information about this integration, contact Emmanuel Marchal