– Colin Mason, senior product manager, Compuware’s APM Business Unit, says:
In late May into early June, Facebook suffered a period of sporadic outages. All around the Web, thousands of other sites that relied on Facebook services, such as the “Like” button, experienced performance and availability issues. Amazon’s EC2 outage in early July took several big sites offline and slowed down many others. In September, a technical malfunction at GoDaddy took down its website and millions more; while in October, a Google App Engine disruption affected thousands of customers around the world that use the platform-as-a-service.
A few short years ago, an outage on a prominent website would likely have resulted in only that single site being impacted. But because today’s modern applications call services from a variety of third-party providers, outages now cascade throughout the Internet and bring other applications and services down with them. The recent issues with Facebook, Amazon, GoDaddy and Google App Engine are just the latest examples of this growing interdependency and the downside that can result from integrating with the cloud and third-party web services.
While these services allow organizations to rapidly deliver a rich user experience, they also expose web and mobile sites to degraded performance—or even a total outage—should any of those components fail. Research shows that the typical website has more than ten separate hosts contributing to a single transaction, many of which come from third-party services such as cloud providers, social media, e-commerce platforms, web analytics, ad servers and content delivery networks.
To help address this complexity, Compuware has announced Outage Analyzer, a new generation performance analytics solution that raises the intelligence of software-as-a-service (SaaS) application performance management (APM). Outage Analyzer provides real-time visualizations and alerts of outages in third-party web services that are mission critical to web, mobile and cloud applications around the globe. Determining whether an application performance issue is the fault of an organization’s code or the fault of a third-party service has never been easier, and Compuware is providing this new service free of charge.
Utilizing cutting-edge big data technologies and a proprietary anomaly detection engine, Outage Analyzer correlates more than a billion object measurementsper day . This data is collected from the Compuware Gomez Performance Monitoring Networkof more than 150,000 test locations and delivers information on specific outages including the scope, duration and probable cause of the event – all visualized in real-time. This data incorporates an unparalleled view of the state of the Internet and includes analysis on thousands of third party services, with more emerging and being evaluated every day.
Compuware’s Outage Analyzer service is a primary example of the emerging industry trend toward applying big data analytics technologies to help understand and resolve application performance and availability issues in near real-time. Outage Analyzer’s ability to analyze and visualize large masses of data, with automated anomaly detection, can help IT and business users better understand the sources and causes of outages in third-party web services. This in turn helps businesses to identify and resolve application performance and availability issues in near real-time. A key building block of Compuware’s “answer-focused APM” strategy, Outage Analyzer offers critical insights for businesses serious about website and web application performance.
