CompuWare suite spots net-inefficient apps
Summary
Topics
Amidst the plethora of gigabit Ethernet switch and wireless networking vendors at Spring NetWorld+Interop was CompuWare, a vendor known mostly for its application development tools. Wait a minute. An app dev vendor at N+I? That was worth a double take as well as further investigation.
Once I learned what the company's Vantage Suite did however, it became perfectly clear why an app dev vendor like CompuWare would be at a show that targets people who are primarily concerned with network performance.
Like another N+I exhibitor that I profiled , CompuWare recognizes that additional bandwidth isn't the only way to improve the performance of a network and the applications that run on it. Sometimes, all it takes to improve that performance is to make the network more efficient by spotting and eliminating congestion. Since CompuWare's roots are in application development, the company is in a natural position to create and offer tools that expose exactly how a company's applications could be the source of that congestion. That ability, to pinpoint the effects of an application on the network, is only a part of the complete picture that CompuWare's Vantage suite creates when taking an application's vital signs.
The Vantage Suite, for example, can isolate a single transaction across multiple tiers and identify how much of the resulting traffic's payload is data, the frequency and nature of the communications between tiers (clients and servers), the total frames generated by the transaction, and where the time from beginning to end was spent (including how much processing time was spent in the clients and servers). All of this is done with the same traditional and passive network capture methods used by other diagnostic tools such as Network Associate's legendary Sniffer. In fact, Vantage can import capture files from Sniffer and other popular packet capture solutions. As with Network Physics NP-1000 family of products, once Vantage has that data, it digests it differently with a specific task in mind--application optimization.
Getting the most out of Vantage however, requires that it be run on a controlled test bed and not in a production environment. Running a test literally involves finding a quiet test network, manually starting the packet capture process, manually starting the transaction, waiting for it to stop, and stopping the capture process.
Once Vantage has that data, it can isolate just about anything related to that transaction. For example, if the transaction involved one or more SQL queries against one or more databases, it can show you exactly how much traffic was generated by that query.
Unlike Network Physics however, which is months away from automating the network's response to that kind of information, the problems that Vantage finds will need to be fixed manually by software developers. For example, if it looks like the aforementioned SQL queries are generating too much network chatter, the application's programmers could be asked to optimize the queries in ways that produce less network traffic while at the same time being mindful of any increased processing requirements on the clients or servers.
Another example of one of Vantage's powerful diagnostics is its ability to detect inefficient packet utilization. For example, if a transaction generates 10,000 packets, but all of them carry half of the data that they're capable of, perhaps the application can be tuned to stuff the packets with more data and reduce the number of packets required by half.
Considering CompuWare's stellar reputation as a provider of enterprise application development tools, you'd expect that CompuWare could automate a response to Vantage's identification of an overly chatty application. Maybe Vantage could export an "optimization goal" object that targets a specific amount of packet reduction and CompuWare's development tools could respond to it with automatically generated code. I asked CompuWare officials if they planned to introduce such a feature. They said it made sense but had no plans so far.
Here's another cool feature CompuWare might consider adding: During the preproduction testing process, Vantage could create digital fingerprints of an application's transactions so that it could easily spot and measure the performance of these transactions once they appear on a production network flooded with other traffic. That way, IT managers can track the actual performance of their applications and anticipate when that performance might be in jeopardy of dipping below acceptable levels. Such a feature could be especially useful where service level agreements are involved.
The closest Vantage gets to this sort of functionality is a spreadsheet-like feature that creates what-if scenarios to approximate an application's performance on a production network. Doing so requires adjusting variables such as total bandwidth, network utilization, and latency.
Stay focused: Sign up for Tech Update Today, the daily e-mail newsletter for those who need to know.
The discussion hasn’t started yet. Why don’t you begin it?
The best of ZDNet, delivered
ZDNet Newsletters
Get the best of ZDNet delivered straight to your inbox
Vendor Showcase
