Manage Application Performance Holistically

IT professionals across organizations have now established effective application monitoring systems for all IT landscape: servers, network, desktops and storage. Such application performance monitoring tools help IT operations professionals predict breaches in the system and be prepared to handle such problems. However, the management of application performance is more complicated than this and is not yet perfected.

This difficulty in application performance management is due to lack of organization and knowledge. Generally application development teams are separated from IT operations personnel. Also, a cross domain perspective is required to understand application performance completely, but this doesn’t happen because IT operation of any institution is organized by their respective domains.

One of the main problems in application performance analysis is that the IT operations employees know little about the application and every time there is a problem, they need the help of the application development staff. This is often time consuming and not always the optimum solution. So in the end, only the single element in the IT infrastructure is identified and corrected instead of examining the code or the data design of the application for faults. The application as a whole within the context of the infrastructure should be considered so that a holistic approach to APM is taken. Such an approach will help improve the efficiency of the performance testing and will be beneficial in the long run.

A survey conducted on organizations using APM solutions to assess their technologies finds that most respondents meet service level agreements less than 75% of the time. One of the top reasons given for this non performance was “failure to manage application performance issues”. This confirms that users as well as businesses consider application performance more important than any SLA metrics.

There is often a conflict when an end user reports an application problem. It is not always possible to find fault in one infrastructure component that replicated the end user’s complaint. Hence, the classic scenario will be that each component manager will insist that their component is not at fault, whereas the end user will insist that there is something wrong. In this situation, the ideal application monitoring can be done by examining individual application transactions. These interactions with the application will reflect end to end performance as well as the end user’s experience.

Hence, for a holistic approach to application performance management to be integrated into business service management, it is necessary for IT operations and application development teams to work together as well as have a cross domain perspective. Also, when the end user complains of some problem with the application, the IT service management should kick into action and examine the individual application transactions. Only through such an approach can application performance management be useful to businesses and organizations.


Note: The information of this blog is based on a White Paper study commissioned by Compuware Corporation titled "Becoming Proactive in Application Performance Management".

What you Need to Know about Business Service Management

Business Service Management (BSM) is a method for monitoring IT services so that its use, benefits and improvisation can be understood from a business perspective. The technology of BSM hence intersects IT with business. By using Business Service Management solutions, the IT department can understand how its investment, its infrastructure and its technology benefit the business. Business Service Management hence tracks, monitors, manages and views the investment and operational part of the information technology to make sure that they are in the interests of business.

Having a Business Service Management solution active is especially useful to those businesses relying solely on its IT department to cater to its customers or to those companies which have a large IT department with a lot of IT infrastructure and systems in place. In such companies, in case a system failure happens, IT heads or business managers will be able to pin point on a real time basis where an error has occurred. Thus, if a business has a proper Business Service Management solution in place, in case of a system malfunction, executives will be able to know exactly where it is happening, how it happened and they will be able to analyze later on how it happened as well. Business managers can quickly analyze the business impact of downtime and IT managers can avoid a breach in service level agreement.

Companies dealing in various industrial verticals are increasingly using hybrid or customized BSM solutions to ensure that their IT service management is backed up by BSM in order to meet customer commitments and SLA.

Benefits of Business Service Management

There are many advantages of using BSM solutions:

• BSM allows businessmen to understand the business impact of system failure• Resources can be allocated efficiently
• Loss in costs can be reduced considerably through a business service management solution
• Support teams can provide better service through such application monitoring enhancements
• Business owners and IT managers can pin point the root cause of a system failure and hence avoid confrontations or debates
• Work can be prioritized according to priorities after the system failure

Service Level Agreements: A Determinant of the Success of the Vendor-Client Partnership

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are an important aspect in business engagements. A Service Level Agreement sets the parameters for deliverables, priorities, responsibilities and guarantees/warranties. IT Buyers seek vendors who make SLAs with clearly defined terms and conditions and a roadmap to achieve the desired goals of their project. An experienced IT company seeking to outsource any part of its final project deliverables would prefer to enter into a SLA (also known as contracted delivery performance) with the outsourcing company. It includes setting, tracking and managing SLAs which is an important part of Outsourcing Relationship Management (ORM) discipline.

SLAs are especially useful in the IT service industry, in which the clients are worried about softwares providing mission-critical services to their business. A single malfunction in IT operations can severely damage the working structure of the business. It is hence vital that the IT service provider has a defined set of rules and strict regulation to ensure that the promised IT services will be delivered. A Service Level Agreement can provide the network administrator with complete details on application availability and is a great tool to application monitoring and performance testing. This also smoothens the business service management process.

An Ideal Service Level Agreement

SLAs are usually scripted keeping in mind the client’s requirement, and essentially differ for each project. However, an ideal SLA has to cover some important aspects like:

• Definition of the services being promised
• How the services will be delivered
• Measurement criteria of services delivered
• Quality standards of the services promised
• Action to be taken if the provider fails to deliver as promised

Advantages of Having a SLA

A Service Level Agreement is applicable to both the vendor and the client. Some of the important advantages of having a SLA are as follows:

• Documented evidence of the agreement
• Sets a framework for quality expectation and implementation
• Makes the rules clear in case of a disagreement between vendor and client
• Makes goals and methodology crystal clear
• Creates a standard in the level of service
• Becomes a basis for improvisation of services