IBM just launched a major upgrade to their Application Performance Management (APM) solution. For those who are not familiar, this is not the legacy ITM/ITCAM family of products. This is a brand new APM offering that is available in SaaS or On Premises and has been built ground up to cater to the needs of LOBs and the evolving Hybrid Ops teams.
Here's what's new in the latest release of IBM Application Performance Management:
Hybrid Monitoring
With the evolution of Two-speed IT, it is becoming imperative for Ops teams to have an visibility into hybrid applications and workloads spanning across private cloud, public cloud and on-premises environments. Let’s say you’re building a Node.js application running on a PaaS platform (like IBM Bluemix) which makes backend database calls to a Database residing on premises in your data center. In order to ensure that this sort of hybrid application is running smoothly, IBM APM offers a single dashboard for end-to-end view of all dependencies of the application, no matter where they are running. With hybrid monitoring Ops teams can use the APM dashboard to manage applications running anywhere (Bluemix or non-Bluemix).
Coverage of 60+ Environments and Counting
IBM APM has one of the most comprehensive coverage in the industry across enterprise technologies (.NET, Java, Oracle, SAP , Microsoft etc) and cloud based technologies (node.js, Ruby, MongoDB etc). IBM APM offers superior monitoring for IBM Middleware and integration stack with end-to-end transaction tracking and code level diagnostics for Websphere application server, IBM Integration Bus, IBM MQ and DataPower appliance and the services they expose.
With the latest release, IBM coverage has expanded to include:
■ Hadoop Monitoring for IBM Big Insights, Cloudera and Hortonworks distributions
■ SAP HANA system and database monitoring
■ Brand new Citrix Virtual Desktop Infrastructure to monitor XenApp and XenDesktop resources
■ New Microsoft Lync server monitoring
■ New Oracle WebLogic monitoring
■ New Log file monitoring embedded in OS agents
IBM also made several key enhancements (new metrics, refined thresholds, new views) to VMware VI, MS Hyper-V and Exchange server, WebSphere Application Server monitoring agents and more. When tracking end-to-end transactions for middleware stacks, IBM APM now exposes all the service dependencies that any resource node may have in the topology.
End User Experience Monitoring
IBM APM added key improvements to its robust end user monitoring capabilities. IBM Website Monitoring, a synthetic monitoring SaaS solution to proactively alert on availability issues from geographies around the world, now monitors internal applications that may be behind your firewall in addition to monitoring external internet facing applications. You can do so by deploying your own points of presence (PoPs) on premises in your data center. You can view all these capabilities in the same user interface dashboard.
For real user response time analysis, IBM APM provides detailed user session and device information by geographic location based on the IP address of the user. This helps APM users isolate if real time performance problems are specific to user groups. For example, one dashboard glance can detect that only iPhone users using Safari from Australia is facing a slowdown.
Migrating Legacy Customers to New APM v8
As IBM delivers these cutting edge capabilities in its brand new APM v8 offering, they need to ensure their legacy customers using ITM/ITCAM/SCAPM v6-v7 can transition over successfully to the new solution.
In order to enable a smooth migration IBM introduced key capabilities such as:
■ Agent coexistence – support multiple versions of the agents (old and new) to run on the same system.
■ Unified Data Warehouse - If users have collected large amounts of historical data from their ITM/ITCAM deployments in the Data Warehouse, they can continue to use the same warehouse to collect data from new v8 agents. Users can further report against this mixed data set.
■ REST APIs to automate the onboarding of the APM v8 environment and agents.
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