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Rolling Review Wrap-Up: APM Suites: Page 3 of 4

In terms of SLA management for APM, Nimsoft's Nimbus was a real leader. Its flexible and robust SLA reporting engine allowed us to manually build application service-level agreements by coordinating groups of monitored components into a comprehensive service view. We could report SLA performance granularly, for example, during defined business hours and excluding particular time slots, such as maintenance windows. Nimbus also let us exclude a particular component, during a specified time range, within a group of elements that operate under an SLA. This level of detail is helpful when IT must exclude an application component that failed because of a customer-generated outage that falls outside its SLA. This happens all too frequently, yet many APM tools are unable to manage this scenario.

Products focused primarily on collecting network packet information, including Network General (now NetScout) and NetQoS, are best suited for troubleshooting performance issues within the network. These appliances allowed us to drill down and get very discrete packet-level performance data and work to determine the nature of problems. However, dashboards and executive views were not the best—we typically needed to integrate into other appliances for this capability, not a seamless process.

One product that handily made our Shortlist is NetIQ AppManager. Although it relies on agents and, as with all rivals, service models needed to be constructed manually, NetIQ did a great job depicting end-to-end application transactions. Its ' la cart pricing will also be extremely attractive for organizations. In the same class, we also liked Quest Foglight's balance of data collection and features. Foglight dashboards can be created easily and set to model high-level business and service views that clearly identify issues as they occur. All that data does come with a price in terms of complexity; Foglight is not as plug-and-play as some of the other tools reviewed.


This article is the wrap-up Rolling Review of Application Performance Mangement. Click on that link to go to the Rolling Reviews home page to read all the features and reviews now.

If you need a synthetic transaction product to monitor Web services, go with Indicative. Its top-down business-service allows organizations to monitor and manage performance as a true service. Indicative does not require IT to manually correlate data in order to build service views; just drag and drop field-component templates into a logical service grouping. As a bonus, you can be up and running in an afternoon, and maintenance was a breeze..
For large enterprises that want scalability and flexibility and don't mind some complexity, Compuware deserves a hard look. This is the most complete system we reviewed in terms of data collection. One ServerManager can support as many as 1,000 agents, and you may add multiple ServerManagers, then access and report on all of them in the VantageView console. We didn't test the scalability of this three-tier agent, controller and console architecture, however, we did validate that it can be distributed across machines. Only HP/Mercury and CA/Wily—neither of which agreed to be reviewed—have comparable diversity in ways to collect data. Given the cost and complexity of these applications, however, they're not for the faint of heart.