Compuware isn’t exactly the first name you would associate with open source Big Data technologies, but the mainframe software powerhouse is determined to change that as it diversifies beyond legacy computing into new growth areas. The latest version of the company’s application performance management (APM) solution offers enhanced support for Hadoop and NoSQL, and provides increased visibility into enterprise analytics environments.

The platform, branded as Compuware APM for Big Data, now ships with improved dashboards that correlate map and reduce tasks to specific users, pools, queues and jobs in Hadoop. The functionality aims to help admins put the numbers in context and identify how performance impacts productivity throughout their organizations. Practitioners can also leverage the software to see how workloads are moved across their clusters, which is handy for identifying problem patterns with data locality and ensure that everything is properly optimized.

“Compuware APM for Big Data is built with the understanding that many organizations are facing major challenges in taming complex deployments and need meaningful, easy and rapid insight in order to maximize their investments and minimize their risks,” commented Steve Tack, the vice president of product management for Compuware’s APM business unit.

Besides the reworked dashboards, the new version adds compatibility with Hadoop 2.0 and Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) 2.0, which include the YARN resource management and scheduling software. More important, HDP is among the only platforms certified to run in Windows environments, which is what ultimately led Compuware to choose it over rivaling distros from Cloudera and MapR. The integration is joined by support for the newest CQL3 release of the Apache Cassandra NoSQL database.

“Our newest innovations and enhancements provide specific advancements across Hadoop, NoSQL and Cassandra to make Big Data simpler and more straightforward. Compuware APM for Big Data will allow our customers to leap ahead in the analytics race,” Tack said.

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