I was speaking to my friends (i.e. former team) at GMO and they told me that Dynatrace was spun off from Compuware.  How could I have missed this?  News sometimes travels slowly.  For those that don’t know, Dynatrace is an amazing APM product and they are now back to their roots of being a company too.

NEWS : Dynatrace reborn as private company after three years as part of Compuware

Products in the Application Performance Management (APM) space are some of the best products to buy in the software industry.  Every major software vendor wants to have a product in the APM space.  Unfortunately they have to play catchup with the likes of Dynatrace, App Dynamics and New Relic.  Why?  That is easy.  Quality, Quality, Quality!

APM products focus on identifying and measuring business transactions, instrumenting your application, and examining the health of your application.  Think of it like a”concierge doctor” for your application that is there with you all the time.  What are some of the things that can be done with a product like Dynatrace?

• What are my top 10 worst performing transactions?
• What errors are impacting my users?
• What tiers are the bottlenecks within my application architecture?
• Is my network infrastructure negatively affecting my application?
• Is my virtual infrastructure negatively affecting my application?
• What caused an outage at 2:33 in the morning?
• Are my transactions getting slower over time?
• What are my slowest database queries?
• What methods (i.e. code) does my application call frequently?

These questions are just a few of the questions that can be answered with Dynatrace.  Notice I said Dynatrace!  I have used almost all of the APM products on the market today.  Each of them have their strengths.  Unfortunately they also have their weaknesses.  While Dynatrace has a few weaknesses, these are weaknesses that most companies will never experience.  Their competition however cannot say that.  Each time I have been convinced to use a competitor product I have felt less than satisfied with the use of that product.  It could be as simple as a feature like capturing business transactions that span asynchronous invocations or a view that aggregates the data to give you an immediate answer.  Most of the competition has issues like this, but not Dynatrace.  Dynatrace is the swiss army knife of APM tools and it just keeps getting better.

Now that they are spun off as a separate company again, I believe that they are the company to watch.  They are definitely better than their competition and now that they are unshackled from Compuware, they will have an opportunity to focus.

Here is an interesting article regarding Dynatrace and their use by some of the top retailers.  I have no doubt that Dynatrace is in use by these major companies and that it is helping them address quality issues.

“Dynatrace is the digital performance solution behind exceptional digital performance leaders, including powerhouse brands such as: Amazon, Staples, Netflix, Sears, Nordstrom, Home Depot, Office Depot, Dell, Costco, The Gap and QVC.”

Dynatrace as #1 Provider of Web Performance Monitoring Solutions

I am currently working on a Xamarin project where I have the need to open two different solutions.  The first solution was a prototype solution of an Apple Watch product we are building.  The second solution is the new production solution.  We decided to create a new solution and bring over assets and code that we want from the prototype.  Sounds good right!  Wrong!

The problem is that you cannot run multiple instances of Xamarin Studio at the same time.  This makes it much harder to copy and paste code and browse existing assets.  Enter Xamarin Studio Launcher v4!  Just add this application to your dock and you are ready to run multiple instances of Xamarin Studio.  You can download Xamarin Studio Launcher v4 here.

There are a number of applications on my Mac that need Java.  Some of them have to use older versions of Java.  Today I found an application that required a specific version of Java to be installed on my Mac.  The version of Java was 1.7.0_60-b19.  Ut Oh!  Yes, Ut Oh!  Java prior to version 1.7.0_67 had an issue installing on Yosemite and later.  These versions of Java treated Max OS X 10.10 or higher as as OS X 10.1.  This caused a bug where the OS version check failed and prevented you from installing Java.

There are two ways to fix this problem that I know.  The first way is to modify the /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist file to spoof the version of OS X to 10.9.  Once modified you can then install Java.  Just remember to modify it back before you restart because you will be in a world of trouble.  Unfortunately this trick did not work on El Capitan.  The second way is to modify the Java package.  This is safer since you are not modifying system files.  Here are the steps.

• Download JDK 7 Update 60 for Mac OS X
• Open the .dmg file.
• Expand the package file

   pkgutil –expand “/Volumes/JDK 7 Update 60/JDK 7 Update 60.pkg” “/tmp/JDK 7 Update 60.unpkg”

• Open the Distribution file using TextEdit.

   open –a TextEdit Distribution

• Find the function pm_install_check() and make sure it always returns true.
• Take the expanded package files and repackage them.

   pkgutil –flatten “/tmp/JDK 7 Update 60.unpkg” “/tmp/JDK 7 Update 60.pkg”

• Install using the new package.

   open “/tmp/JDK 7 Update 60.pkg”

The installer will run and skip the OS version check.  You should be able to install without any problems.