Compuware 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. Compuware is providing this new service free of charge. Check out Outage Analyzer here.

Utilizing cutting-edge big data technologies and a proprietary anomaly detection engine, Outage Analyzer correlates more than eight billion data points per day. This data is collected from the Compuware Gomez Performance Monitoring Network of 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.

"Compuware's new 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," said Tim Grieser, Program VP, Enterprise System Management Software at IDC. "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."

Cloud and third-party web services allow organizations to rapidly deliver a rich user experience, but 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 cloud services such as social media, ecommerce platforms, web analytics, ad servers and content delivery networks.

Outage Analyzer addresses this complexity with the following capabilities:

- Incident Visualization: Issues with third-party services are automatically visualized on Outage Analyzer's global map view. This view displays information on the current status, impact—based on severity and geography—and duration, along with the certainty and probable cause of the outage. Outage Analyzer also provides a timeline view that shows the spread and escalation of the outage. The timeline has a playback feature to replay the outage and review its impact over time.

- Incident Filtering and Searching: With Outage Analyzer, users can automatically view the most recent outages, filtered by severity of impact, or search for outages in specific IPs, IP ranges or service domains. This allows users to find the outages in services that are potentially impacting their own applications.

- Alerting: Users can sign-up to automatically receive alerts—RSS and Twitter feeds—and can specify the exact types of incidents to be alerted on such as popularity of third-party web service provider, certainty of an outage and by the geographical region impacted. Alerts contain links to the global map view and details of the outage. This provides an early-warning system to potential problems.

- Performance Analytics Big Data Platform: Utilizing cutting-edge big data technologies in the cloud, including Flume and Hadoop, Outage Analyzer collects live data from the entire Gomez customer base and Gomez Benchmark tests, processing more than eight billion data points per day. The processing from raw data to visualization and alerting on an outage all happens within minutes, making the outage data timely and actionable.

- Anomaly Detection Algorithms: At the heart of Outage Analyzer's big data platform is a proprietary anomaly detection engine that automatically identifies availability issues with third-party web services that are impacting performance of the web across the globe. Outage Analyzer then correlates the outage data, identifies the source of the problem, calculates the impact and lists the probable causes — all in real-time.

"Since Outage Analyzer has been up and running, we've seen an average of about 200 third-party web service outages a day," said Steve Tack, Vice President of Product Management for Compuware's APM business unit. "Outage Analyzer is just the beginning. Our big data platform, propriety correlation and anomaly detection algorithms, and intuitive visualizations of issues with cloud and third-party web services are key building-blocks to delivering a new generation of answer-centric APM."