Company improves analysis in Vantage 9 Compuware on Monday is introducing Vantage 9, an application service management product featuring finer-grained analysis.The product monitors application service from an end-user perspective rather than just monitoring infrastructure components, the company said.“Vantage 9 really provides a service focus to application management,” said John Williams, director of launch management at Compuware. “You get a holistic view of what service you’re delivering,” Williams said.A user of Vantage is looking forward to using a new reporting function to consolidate data.“In Version 8, we had to create additional database tables and define our own reports so they aligned more closely with the business users,” said Craig Walker, enterprise architect at West Bend Mutual Insurance, in an e-mail response to questions. “Compuware has incorporated many of these reports in Version 9, internally calling them the ‘West Bend Mutual Features.’ “ New capabilities in Version 9 include enabling IT teams to view the scope of application service problems in terms of affected applications, locations, transactions, and users. Duration and frequency of problems also are gauged.A summary views feature highlights performance by application and location while “heat” charts allow IT to identify service violations and application outages by time of day and week and by transaction.An “exception-based analysis” function measures network behavior throughout the course of a transaction. Available now, Vantage 9 costs $19,000 for an introductory configuration. Software Development