As network outsourcing management continues to represent an increasing proportion of IT company revenues, applications management tools and services company , Compuware Corp, has added a service level agreement (SLA) performance analysis feature to its flagship products. Version 4.0 of EcoScope, one of three components in the Farmington Hills, Michigan, applications management and development tools company’s EcoSystems suite introduces a Scorecard feature which measures the business application performance and rates it against pre-established SLAs. The product is aimed at outsourcers that wish to ensure they are meeting their SLA targets, and at businesses wanting to check that SLAs are being met.
EcoScope works by sniffing packets from network traffic and identifying it by application rather than IP address, said Tukun Chaterjee, Compuware’s Product Marketing Manager. The data is then used to compile response time, traffic type, key servers and user indicators. For example, says Chaterjee, a key scorecard metric is the UIN (User Impact Number), which EcoScope calculates by multiplying the amount of time by which an application exceeded performance requirements with the number of users impacted by the performance degradation, giving an indication of which applications are under-performing. The idea is to make things easy to read, so the higher the number, the more severe the under-performance of the application. Chaterjee says the product comes with a user interface which includes a number of pre-configured data views and also allows the creation of new ones.
Chaterjee claims the product automatically recognizes over 15,000 applications, including those of all the major vendors such as SAP and Baan, Oracle and Microsoft, and can be programmed to recognize any others. EcoSystems resides on Microsoft Windows NT and 98/2000 platforms, and was beta tested to scale to over 100,000 nodes. The product is due for general release next month, staring at $36,500 – users of EcoScope 3.7 upgrade for free.
