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The End All of Network Performance Management: Page 7 of 21

VantageView includes a new component, Visualizer, that lets you graphically map live data to a bitmap. Compuware smartly lets you use Visio diagrams with this feature. You have to buy Visio, but you can view those diagrams, with status, within a browser. Sweet!

Among Vantage's other components, ClientVantage is notable for its extremely clear service-level reporting. ClientVantage reports look at transaction response time in unbelievable detail. For example, starting with a month's summary of data, a response time can be drilled into, showing the day in hour increments. You can drill even further into specific client-resource environments to determine the point at which the SLA (service-level agreement) was violated. No other product in the test had this level of detail.

But to determine what's normal and what's an exception, you must know where to look for the current data then create a report that compares it to past traffic.

Administering groups of ClientVantage, ServerVantage and Application Expert agents is infinitely flexible; Vantage can conform to any departmental or user grouping needed. This allows performance and fault agent functions to be configured and arranged to provide differing alerts, transactions and performance metrics.

On the other hand, creating robotic transactions using ClientVantage and Application Expert is likely to bloody your knuckles. Compuware's authoring tool, QARun, must run on a separate box, and, while it supports any type of transaction, you have to figure out how it works first. Not a good use of time. Also, managing the robotic scripts is not seamless enough for the state of this technology. For example, QARun creates transaction scripts in an Access database by default. Though the product supports MS SQL and Oracle, distributing the database (as our test required) requires considerably more work on either platform. ProactiveNet and Concord's eHealth Suite have more centralized, integrated support.