What is Application Availability ?

Application availability is the inclination of an application to handle end user requests and to return timely and accurate responses. As business becomes increasingly dependent on information technology, application availability is a universal concern for every business, in every IT infrastructure. The need for system availability extends across all components of a network. But nowhere the availability of a system is more obvious to users or more analytical of the competence of IT managers than at the application level. The function of application availability is to meet business needs. For today’s business-critical applications, enterprises require robust, proven solutions for application performance and IT monitoring. They must be confident that they are protected, not only against physical server failures, but also from outages that affect individual virtual servers and the applications running inside them.

Web-based business applications have become an essential component of every business. These applications are mission-critical, executing various organizational business processes. Whether it is a pure Web-based multi-tier application or a front end to an existing ERP or legacy system, the availability of the application and the content of transaction output need to be monitored all time, to ensure the reliable and correct operation of the business processes. Tevron’s CitraTest APM provides a way to quickly, efficiently, and discreetly monitor the application availability, reliability, and application performance as well as capture the hard-to-get URL-to-SQL application metrics. It presents these important metrics in a manner that enables hard communication and rapid proactive or reactive detection, correction, and verification throughout the application lifecycle. By using CitraTest APM, the availability of the application has increased and improved by a few percentage points so that thousand man-hours of down-time is saved and hence results in millions of dollars in improved efficiency throughout the organization.

Through the use of Tevron’s CitraTest APM, IT Administrators can better monitor access and performance and cost effectively run IT in alignment with company objectives. As a result, Business Managers can boost up IT Performance that helps achieve the business goals through increased IT efficiency and profitability.

Tevron's APM solutions address the critical IT issues identified in Aberdeen's recent Application Performance Management Research

Nashua, New Hampshire, November 20, 2008 - Tevron’s APM solutions directly address the key critical IT needs identified in Aberdeen’s Applications Performance Management Research. Some of the key findings from this Aberdeen research include:

• Issues with application performance can impact overall revenues by up to 9%
• Rolling out new enterprise applications is the top IT initiative for the next 12 months
• Only 44% of organizations are satisfied with performance of business-critical applications
• Inability to prevent network and application performance issues before they impact end-users is the top challenge around network and application performance management
• Inability to test applications in pre-production, lack of tools for visibility into network and application performance, and lack of visibility into quality of end-user experience are the top concerns for the next 12 months
• Server and desktop virtualization projects and increased amount of digital content are the top 2 technology drivers for investing in new network and application performance management solutions

"Best-in-Class companies identified by Aberdeen surveys and interviews were found to be twice as likely as others to manage deployed services proactively. This demonstrates and underscores how Tevron's CitraTest APM can help companies to maximize the business value of their IT investments by monitoring application performance proactively and comprehensively," says Michael Dortch Senior Analyst, Aberdeen. This solution delivers unmatched proactive monitoring, transaction monitoring, real-time alerting, real-time monitoring, application availability, application performance, IT Service Management, Business Service Management (BSM), and SLM. Every environment, every business process, and every application is supported. Compared to the legacy management products available on the market, this solution is more scalable, more flexible, support all environments with a single technology, more cost effective, and easier to maintain and deploy.

ABOUT TEVRON - Tevron is a global leader in APM and Automated Testing. Through our all encompassing customer-centric vision and advanced technology, our APM & Testing Solutions allow the unique flexibility of supporting every application across the enterprise with one methodology delivering the ability to test, monitor, enforce SLAs, and optimize performance with confidence and ease. Founded in 2001, Tevron® is a global organization and is privately held. Our vast and diverse range of customers are global leaders and include companies such as Citigroup, DaimlerChrysler, Alcon, USPTO, Siemens, DeuBa, Lockheed Martin, and hundreds of others(Tevron's Customers).

Tevron Releases v7.2 of CitraTest APM and Real-Time Web Console with support for Every Application

Tevron Releases v7.2 of CitraTest APM & the CitraTest APM Real-Time Web Console with support for Every Application & Every Business Process.

Tevron offers the ONLY testing & End to End monitoring solutions that fully support EVERY enterprise application that is accessible from a Windows based machine. No application is left behind.

Nashua, New Hampshire, November 13, 2008 – Tevron, the global leader in APM and testing solutions, today announced the release of version 7.2 of CitraTest APM & the CitraTest APM Real-Time Web Console. This solution delivers unmatched proactive monitoring, transaction monitoring, real-time alerting, real-time monitoring, application availability, application performance, IT Service Management, Business Service Management (BSM), and SLM. Every environment, every business process, and every application is supported. Compared to the legacy management products available on the market, this solution is more scalable, more flexible, support all environments with a single technology, more cost effective, and easier to maintain and deploy.

“Through the use of Tevron’s APM Solutions, IT Managers can better manage and enhance overall customer experience in regard to application performance and availability. As a result, Business Managers get an IT environment that is aligned with the business along with increased efficiency and profitability,” says Jay Labadini, Vice President. To learn more about Tevron’s APM & Testing solutions, to request additional information, schedule a demonstration.

ABOUT TEVRON - Tevron is a global leader in APM and Automated Testing. Through our all encompassing customer-centric vision and advanced technology, our APM & Testing Solutions allow the unique flexibility of supporting every application across the enterprise with one methodology delivering the ability to test, monitor, enforce SLAs, and optimize performance with confidence and ease. Founded in 2001, Tevron is a global organization and is privately held. Our vast and diverse range of customers are global leaders and include companies such as Citigroup, DaimlerChrysler, Alcon, USPTO, Siemens, DeuBa, Lockheed Martin, and hundreds of others .

Transaction Monitoring Solutions for End Users

Any business enterprise needs transaction monitoring solutions. Application measuring, monitoring service levels and system health is of great importance for any organization. Most of the monitoring tools are designed to monitor comprehensive infrastructures and devices. Major problems of application performance are reported to the IT team by the end users experience. IT service management needs a solution that can proactively see these problems and help to solve them before the end-user gets impacted.

These “Real User Transactions” are securely executed in the Windows service space to actively measure the End-To-End User Experience. Through the deployment of Tevron’s APM solutions, every application across the enterprise can be accurately measured and actively monitored allowing for the enforcement of all SLAs. By providing the ability to perform “Secure-Parallel Monitoring”, a single monitoring machine can remain in a “logged off” state from a specific point of presence in the enterprise to execute and measure real-world user transactions concurrently ensuring security and further expanding the overall coverage bandwidth. CitraTest APM can efficiently help for transaction monitoring that can uncover errors, misuse, and identify key process risks based on transactions, controls and business. It can correct unexpected results at an early stage.

Using Tevron’s CitraTest APM makes it easy to monitor and measure end user experience. Its robust transaction monitoring feature can track and alert on application and service health, notifying before the problem can impact. By monitoring the end user response time, it can perform customer analytics and system health check from the server’s outer boundaries.

CitraTest APM is easy to use and integrates with other tools to provide superior transaction monitoring and application monitoring solution support platform for customizable web based reports and real time dashboards.

How to deal with the Key Challenges to Citrix Monitoring?

When monitoring any Citrix hosted application, the key challenge is to identify how any application is responding at any point across the enterprise based on the real user perspective. How do the end-users see application perform from their client access points? It’s important to know whether every location delivers similar performance.

Tevron’s CitraTest® APM solution is an all encompassing APM solution that addresses the needs of Citrix monitoring, End to End Response Time, Availability Monitoring, and SLA Enforcement across any organization. All measurements are based on the Real User Experience and nothing is installed on the Citrix application server.

Tevron’s CitraTest® APM can replicate every user transaction and execute it periodically from every client access point. All these real user measurements are then collected and analyzed. Application performance thresholds can be set and alerts can be generated when those thresholds are exceeded. This approach gives IT organizations the ability to proactively and continuously manage every application across the enterprise, preventing system down time and saving time and money.

• Unique Benefits Delivered
  
  Tevron’s CitraTest® APM supports every application across the enterprise with one powerful solution. Any activity a Real User performs can be exactly replicated to be used as a measuring stick. Because the production environment is not changed in any way and all measurements are taken from the client perspective, the benchmarks and application availability metrics are exactly what the real users see and experience. This critical information can then be used to find and correct application performance issues before end users find them.

• Open Architecture

Tevron’s core monitoring technology is based on an open architecture allowing IT organizations to integrate this solution seamlessly into their current methodologies. All performance results can be shared with any application. In addition, full support for Microsoft MOM 2005 is also offered along with support for several other Event Management and Performance Systems.


• Ease of Use and Deployment

Tevron’s CitraTest® APM can easily be deployed across the enterprise to actively monitor all enterprise applications. There is no limit to the number of applications or the number of locations that can be monitored. This solution is easy to use and the user experience scripts are easy to create and deploy. All results are stored in a central database that is accessible via a Web based console. SLA reports based on application, location, and user type are automatically generated on a daily basis for IT Managers to analyze.

Source : This article is an excerpt from ‘Citrix-Tevron Platform Integration Case Study’ published on Citrix Web site (https://support.citrix.com/article/ctx108697)

Citrix Resource Management Services

With the rising dependence of applications running on server-based environments, more accurate monitoring tools are needed to measure application performance quality to give surety for user satisfaction. Tevron’s CitraTest VU offers a complete, revolutionary and cost effective Citrix load testing solutions designed especially for Terminal Server and Citrix enterprise users in the pre-and post deployment phases. CitraTest VU replicates real users and also measures the overall application response time based on real user loads. Before your application goes live, you now will be sure that maximum number of users that can be realistically supported through the use of CitraTest VU.

By using CitraTest VU load testing, tuning and application performance management solutions, companies can get a benefit from their Citrix hosted applications, and applications can be easily accessed via Citrix client, allowing them to deliver optimal performance to all users. CitraTest VU offers value by fulfilling multiple enterprise requirements and it is used for ongoing Service Level Agreement (SLA) testing, service level reporting and Application Performance Monitoring (APM) via CitraTest APM.

Tevron offers Citrix Resource Management Services for end to end server performance solutions to simplify the system installation, management, deployment and end user access across the enterprise. CitraTest VU product provides server farm application installation, Citrix capacity planning, Citrix monitoring and application reviews. Citrix resource management services providing real-time monitoring and management of application and system resources so it keeps terminal server performing at optimum levels. It captures relevant application information to assist IT professionals in capacity planning, application updates, and performance troubleshooting.

Additional functionality of Citrix Resource Manager

• Real Time Monitoring - The monitored counters which are called Metrics in Citrix Resource Performance Manager. You can assign this into two steps warning and error. If these steps are hit Resource Manager then you can directly use some methods like SNMP, E-mail or SMS.
  
  
• It can store the collected database for a long time. This makes it feasible to generate reports based on current and past activity.
  
  
• Resource Manager having option to create billing crystal reports on self defined costs.
  
  
• Besides the system counters, Citrix RM collect specific data like User activity, Application usage and Farm information.

End to End Application Performance - Why is it important?

End to end performance application management in any IT business is of utmost importance. A good performance tool helps the testing process and can be the smartest way of measuring performance in applications. Tevron’s Citratest APM provides End-to-End Response Time Monitoring, availability monitoring, SLA enforcement for every application across the organization. Being a top Citratest APM vendor; it includes solution to reduce the costs of IT troubleshooting, lost revenues, and lost end-user efficiency. End-to-end APM is the last stage of the project in an application monitoring cycle. It improves the performance of the system.

Nowadays all types of enterprises rely upon complex, multi-tier applications in order to successfully conduct IT service management and business service management. These types of high level security application are engaged across industries of banking, telecommunications, securities, government, financial applications, online trade, medical care and many more which having huge database. These applications require end-to-end monitoring and response time to ensure availability and performance testing.


End-to-end performance testing can prevent unpleasant situations when the application is being tested in the production environment, and you also get an estimate of how many virtual users your environment is able to handle during your performance integration tests. End-to-end testing of performance of any server side or web based applications is a complex and time-consuming task. Tevron is a global software company that develops and delivers the most powerful and comprehensive suite of End To End performance and APM solutions.

• Citratest APM integrates monitoring and business performance metrics into a single view that can be customized for application stakeholders.


• End to end response time monitoring resolve the application performance problem quickly by looking into detailed user activity.


• End user performance management quantifies the real end user experience relative to availability of the application and established the different services levels.


• Citratest APM allows your technical administrator by typing infrastructure performance issues to end user functional activity.

Tevron’s Citratest APM delivers faster problem resolution, easier deployment and administration, as well as a complete performance management platform.

How to increase your application performance?

When it comes to determining the application performance and availability, there are three commonly observed metrics used by organizations worldwide: End to end performance management, Application availability and Monitoring tools. Therefore, it is important to know the application predominance for the end-user along with the response time.

The end to end performance monitoring tools help to tie up the end-user performance with IT infrastructure. The end-user transaction time allows network experts to analyze the behavior of applications, networks, and servers. The first step is to make strategic decisions, such as how to optimize the network, plan new infrastructure, and identify the severity and occurrence of problems.



For example, end-to-end performance monitoring enables the network professionals to decide for the network optimization and application-acceleration technologies that are required the most.

End-to-end application response time monitoring with Tevron’s CitraTest APM delivers the best services to the end users and also provides the best overall view of what is happening on the network.

Through the deployment of CitraTest APM, IT Managers can actively monitor the End To End performance of every application that is accessible from Windows based PC including Thick Client, Citrix, Terminal Services, and all Web based applications. Most important is that the end to end performance metrics are based on the Real User Experience and not a replicated session. No other APM solution available in the market today offers support for every application through a single license solution.

It also monitors all the TCP application packets from the network and measures network round trip time, server response time, data transfer time, and much more.

The product uses a combination of hardware with embedded software to emulate networks of an IT infrastructure for application testing for application performance troubleshooting on live networks.

All that you need to know about Application Monitoring

The function of the application monitoring software is to monitor incoming traffic to applications and check for unauthorized access or possible data theft. The software product takes note of the source and time of traffic for network administrator’s reference while troubleshooting any application. These types of software are used in high level of security applications like financial application software or maintaining huge database applications.


The additional functionality of the software is to solve the problem of the operating system and the system of application itself. Certain considerations are made to ensure that it is safe to use in most production environments and your software should be able to create programs according to your requirement in your system.



Types of Application Monitoring Software

• Database Application Monitoring Software: Database application monitoring software is mainly used to examine database based applications and their activities. It protects confidential information of the database from unauthorized access.


• Web Application Monitoring Software: Web based application monitoring software is used to examine online activity of program and interaction with other web-based programs. It avoids unauthorized use and protects web applications from getting corrupted due to viruses.

There are many software development companies offer application monitoring solutions which can customize the solution as per network administrator’s requirements Check out the best monitoring tools and solutions to boost application performance related problems.

What is Service Level Agreement?

The definition of SLA (Service Level Agreement) in measurable terms - services to be provided, the standards to be managed in the execution of those services, and the cost that occur in event that standards are not met.

In service industry the market is varies according to its multiplier principle. The title ‘service’ is defining that its own identity coming out of production and manufacturing corners. It is very simple to define but bit difficult to experience and keep promises.

Focusing on IT service management, service is focusing on more professional terms than simply promises in words. Your client expects you to node you head on defined agreement.

Service level agreement means follow proper principles, sound business governance and underpinned with human and technical terms and resources. SLA is basically a result-oriented performance agreement that can measure performance and determine the quality of services provided from one group to another.

"An SLA is an agreement that is designed to create a common understanding about work priorities, services and responsibilities."

1. SLA initiates communication with other vendors to offer service to clients
2. SLA aims to create base of effective evaluating or quality reviewing
3. SLA works as dispute prevention tool and clears all doubts among parties.
4. SLA is a legal document with the right of entry for service satisfaction and adjust for negotiations.
5. It is a sound base to determine resource requirements covering software, hardware, human resource, process and organization. It also covers that what the business experts to do now.

The user satisfaction factors included key measurements of application availability and performance, recovery, Service Level Management features like agreements, SLA reporting, measurement, monitoring, and documentations. These are various resources to use, and trends in help desk use and software costs. Performance management and fault management are incontestable components found in Service level agreement.

Importance of Software Testing for successful IT Management

Software is a series of instructions for a computer to perform a particular task or a program. The two major categories of software are system software and application software. System software is made up of control programs. Application software is any program that processes data for the user (spreadsheet, word processor, payroll, etc.).



A software product undergoes three phases: Development, Testing and Bug Fixing. Testing verifies the software performance, stability and error responsiveness in various test scenarios under controlled conditions. The other qualities that are assessed in the Testing phase are, ease of use, efficiency, compatibility with other platforms and user’s efficacy.

Software testing company has a wide area to work upon. The IT industry may be flooded with a variety of software testing services. There is application monitoring, transaction monitoring, terminal service monitoring, compatibility testing, functional testing, performance testing, load testing, regression testing, stress testing, and unit testing just to name a few.

A successful deployment of testing modules will:

• Speed up development process by identifying bugs of the software at an early stage (e.g. specifications stage)
• By discovering bugs and design flaws at early stages of development, rather than post launch
• Reduce the organization’s risk of legal liability
• Maximize the value of the software
• Promote continual improvement

Software testing company works to deliver quality assured software applications for big as well as small project. They analyze the difficulties keeping in view that each project developed is unique. The need for validating a software product is not just once, but a recurring one connected with every new release.