PALO ALTO, Calif., June 30, 1997 -- The 17 industry-leading technology vendors that comprise the ARM Working Group today announced plans for two major enhancements to the Application Response Measurement (ARM) application programming interface (API). In addition, specific vendor implementations of ARM were announced for several of the industry's most widely used management applications.
The first enhancement planned for the ARM API will enable administrators to identify the specific components of a transaction that may be impacting overall application performance. The second API upgrade will enable management applications to determine whether a problem exists based on expected vs. actual transaction-response times -- taking into account the variables that can impact response time.
These enhancements are expected to be finalized this summer and are designed to help information technology (IT) personnel focus on the major factors causing slow transaction-response time. Applications and management tools that incorporate the enhanced API will remain ARM-compatible with software that is using the current Version 1.0 of the API.
"Monitoring end-user response time is critical to our ability to manage application performance and is key to proactive capacity planning," said Scott Griffin, information systems director of the redesign project for Boeing Commercial Airplane Group. "To more effectively work with our software partners that support our business-process redesign effort, each of our mission-critical applications are instrumented for compatibility with the ARM API. As the software and business processes are deployed to a larger population within Boeing, this data will become increasingly important to managing our environment."
"The ability to easily monitor transaction response time provides an exciting opportunity for proactive problem detection, as well as monitoring application performance levels," said George Sullivan, vice president, Citicorp Systems and Network Management Resource Center. "The enhancements to the ARM API will help Citicorp improve its service-level reporting data and quickly isolate problems and correct them before service is disrupted. We have included the ARM API in our suite of proposed application instrumentation standards for software development."
BGS currently supports the ARM standard on Windows NT through BEST/1 Visualizer. BEST/1 Visualizer supports flexible periodic reporting of performance data, including transaction response time. BGS is planning ARM support in its BEST/1 for UNIX product line in the third quarter. This will include the response time, alarming on service-level violations and report generation.
Candle has released ETEWatch, a new response-time monitor designed to report on various graphical user interface (GUI)-based desktop applications, such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer, in a client/server environment. ETEWatch can be customized to report on customer-built conjunction with applications that are instrumented with the ARM API.
Compuware Corporation will provide ARM-based transaction monitoring in its EcoTOOLS solution. EcoTOOLS is an application-performance monitoring tool that focuses on in-depth analysis of applications and their components. EcoTOOLS will provide a facility for monitoring ARM data and will support future ARM capabilities as they become available.
Hewlett-Packard Company currently supports ARM in its OpenView GlancePlus, MeasureWare and PerfView resource and performance management suites. HP intends to implement ARM in HP AdminFlow, its workflow-management product, by the end of 1997.
Landmark Systems will support the ARM API in the next major release of PerformanceWorks, its enterprise performance-management platform. In addition, that will extend the value of the ARM API.
Oracle Corporation is integrating the ARM API with its Oracle Trace product. This integration will allow users of ARM-enabled applications that are built on the Oracle8 universal data server to correlate ARM transaction data with Oracle server performance data. This data also will serve as analysis input for the Oracle Expert product, which provides database design and tuning based on actual database workload.
SAS Institute's IT Service Vision, software for evaluating Information Technology services, will support ARM data being created for performance warehousing, analysis and reporting. SAS Institute also plans to use the ARM API to instrument its suite of business solutions beginning in the fourth quarter of 1997.
SES will release its SES/Strategizer, a Windows NT modeling tool for conducting end-to-end performance analysis of client/server systems. Strategizer 1.3 will include facilities for generating ARM response-time statistics of modeled applications. The following version will include generation of correlated ARM response-time statistics for modeled applications.
With the new version of TME 10 Distributed Monitoring, ARM agents are now available from Tivoli for Windows 95, Windows NT, OS/2, HP-UX, Sun Solaris, and AIX. TME 10 Reporter 2.0 provides built-in consolidation, summarization, and reporting of ARM data.
Unify continues its leadership in application management by supporting the ARM API in its VISION development tool. Future versions of VISION and VISION/Web will also support ARM.
The Computer Measurement Group (CMG) says it plans to work closely with the ARM Working Group to ensure that the ARM API continues to evolve in lockstep with user needs. The CMG provides an effective forum for the ARM Working Group to regularly interact with users and potential users of ARM technology through the CMG's ARM Special Interest Group.
"Mission-critical application performance is increasingly being viewed as a competitive differentiator and the ARM API is recognized as an effective standard for measuring performance against business needs," said Brian Morrow, director of component-based development for Texas Instruments Software. "Such end-user requirements are the main reason we plan to make our software development tools ARM-compliant."
To help ensure that application developers are fully equipped to use the ARM API, an ARM Software Developers Kit (SDK) has been created. The SDK makes it easy for developers to mark sections of their applications to define business transactions.
The ARM SDK is available at no charge from HP's OpenView Program and Tivoli Systems through their World Wide Web sites: http://www.hp.com/go/arm and http://www.tivoli.com/n_arm.
The ARM Working Group is comprised of BGS, BMC Software, The Boeing Company, Boole & Babbage, Candle, Citicorp, Compuware, Hewlett-Packard Company, IBM, Landmark, Oracle, SAS, SES, Sun, Tivoli, Unify and Wells Fargo.
Formed in 1996, the ARM Working Group works with industry-standards bodies to ensure that the ARM API will continue to be a valuable industry standard for managing applications, monitoring application performance and measuring IT service levels.
For further information about implementations of the ARM API, visit the World Wide Web sites of the ARM Working Group member companies.
© 1997 CMG Arm CMG