Application Service Management

You may have heard the term Application Service Management before, but do you know what it means? If the answer to that question happens to be no, don't feel bad. Application Service Management is a term than needs defining for even some of the most experienced IT Professionals at some point. Simply put, Application Service Management (or ASM as it is commonly referred to) is a third party entity that delivers, distributes and manages services and solutions to customers via a large network from a core data center.

The essential point of Application Service Management is to provide your business or origination with a way to analyze, monitor and control all of your IT applications and make it easy to prevent and resolve any problems or hassles that may occur.

Application Service Management makes dealing with your many IT applications easy and undemanding, whether you are in need of service for servers, networks, end-users, databases or the mainframe. Any type of institution that uses IT- from big business and political institutions to non-profit organizations- can greatly benefit from Application Service Management. There are countless problems that can arise with IT, and if something goes wrong it is best to be able to solve the problem as soon as possible, and Application Service Management is by far the best way to do this.

There are many types of companies who provide Application Service Management applications, from local specialist companies to larger business minded companies, and there are some who create ASM applications that can be used by any organization who uses IT. Companies who have this more general approach are by far the best. One such company that excels in providing great Application Service Management applications is Compuware.

Compuware are masters at Application Service Management and they are by far one of the most successful IT software development companies in the country, if not the world. With their various applications such as Vantage, Strobe, and File-AID, Compuware is ranked firmly in the top tier of Application Service Management solutions. There are many things that separate Compuware's approach to ASM and IT in general from the approach that other companies take. Let's discuss some of those major differences.

First, let's talk about one of the most important aspects of ASM: Troubleshooting. Compuware provides customers with troubleshooting solutions that address the performance of applications throughout the system, not just on one aspect or area. They integrate very deep diagnostic tools to monitor services to provide you with heavily detailed and comprehensive troubleshooting information and insight. The solutions that Compuware offer help you find and repair problems with infrastructure and application performance.

Using the applications that Compuware provides you with eliminates hours spent on guesswork, as these applications will easily fins and pinpoint even the hardest to find problems in your system. If you are using distributed applications then Vantage would be best for your troubleshooting needs, while those using mainframe applications would be better suited with Strobe. And regardless of what kind of system you are using, Abend-AID should be able to locate and eradicate any existing problems. This level of effectiveness is simply not available with other ASM providers, which is just one of the reasons that Compuware are at the top of their industry.

Compuware also excels at End-user monitoring. If an ASM application is going to be successful, it must be able to measure end-user experience instead of just measuring infrastructure performance like many other applications do. Strobe assists IT experts in optimizing the end-user experience by bringing responsive, effective and efficient applications to the table that consume the least amount of resources possible. Vantage helps monitor end-users by measuring response times of business transactions 24/7 via a means of high end-user experience monitoring via every type of application from web to Java to client/server and Citrix that span the entire infrastructure, which is highly effective.

Something that many IT providers lack in is effective service assurance. When you receive IT applications from Compuware, you can rely on them to provide accurate end-to-end service assurance. Compuware will accurately describe levels of service before the application is used. You can use Strobe to analyze the mainframe's resource consumption, which will give you opportunities to improve any stage of the application's existence.

Using Vantage will provide you with a simply way to examine the impact and effectiveness of many performance adjustments such as application structure, server load, network bandwidth and latency that effect the response time of an application. This is mainly effective for making proper changes before an application rollout. You can also use Aben-AID to provide performance improvement opportunities via multiple-fault-event correlation for root-cause analysis and single-fault event root-cause analysis during the life cycle of the application.

Compuware also delivers excellent Performance Tuning via their ASM applications by providing you with a single vendor solution that
broadcasts service management requirements across applications that span mainframe and client/server environments. Using Vantage will allow you to predict the effect that many performance adjustments have on the response time of a transaction, which allows you to validate that your performance will be improved. You can also use Compuware applications to manufacture archives of reports, which will help managers sport opportunities for improvement and trends.

Another important aspect of IT that Compuware excels at is Cost Management. Simply put, using the applications that Compuware offers can help you save money by optimizing the various costs of application delivery. Vantage makes infrastructure costs much more efficient by assisting in bandwidth subscriptions and consolidating servers, and Strobe eliminates code that consumes resources, which allows your AIT to be much more efficient. It also reduces the IT costs by decreasing your CPU and MIPS usage, which lets you more effectively manage your budget. Few other companies provide you with Cost Management applications that are as effective as the ones that Compuware offer.

If your organization is using IT, then you need to consider using one of Compuware's many Application Service Management solutions.