Chapter 1. The Case for Application Performance Management
This chapter includes the following topics:
Why application performance is important A life cycle approach to managing networked applications The benefits to the enterprise
Network-based applications provide unprecedented opportunities for organizations to reach more customers with ever more useful services. These services, and the networking and computing systems they run on, are critical for market success. The applications boost productivity dramatically and increase the flexibility and responsiveness of the organizations that use them.
These critical pieces are not just routers, servers, and word processors. They are banking systems, worldwide airline reservation systems, e-retailing, multimedia-based applications, and the likemission-critical applications that are made up of numerous components and deployed across a distributed enterprise or many geographical regions.
These applications, fundamentally different from their predecessors, have additional dependencies on more systems spread over an ever-wider geographical area, occasionally crossing organization boundaries. Their functions are spread over the entire network, and they exploit many different technologies. Although these new technologies offer far superior services to a larger user base than ever before, at the same time these systems must be more reliable, scalable, and available. Nonavailability of applications has far greater repercussions on a business today.
All these components from PCs (clients), to networks, to applications, to operating systems (OS), to servers, to applications have to work with each other in a coordinated manner.
Statistics about specific routers, servers, or utilities that support these business systems are certainly helpful, but they do not tell you whether a business application is measuring up to its potential. To make the latter happen, you need to know whether business transactions are being completed successfully, if transaction response times are satisfactory, who is using an application, and so on. In other words, the ability to achieve excellent management and integration of critical resources is a determinant of the success or failure of an enterprise's business model and its initiatives.
Determining whether business applications are functioning properly from the end user's perspective is the single most important challenge faced by IT in delivering acceptable service for business-critical applications.
The requirement to understand application performance has led to a methodology and process widely known as application performance management (APM). Despite all the technically sophisticated ways in which network and system resources can be measured, end users really only perceive two things about an application's performance:
By measuring and delivering against these requirements, and by tuning the combination of application architecture and underlying infrastructure, you can assist in the improvement of the business process.
This chapter discusses the theory behind the end-to-end story, how APM enhances the full spectrum of the IT process, from operational tasks to planning initiatives. It includes the reasoning behind why there is a need to view the delivery model across client, network, and server, and what is actually meant by the term APM in the context of the enterprise.
This chapter addresses how APM can be applied through every aspect of the application life cycle, enabling users in network operations, engineering, planning, and application development to be far more effective in optimizing performance and availability of their networks and applications.
In addition to roles and responsibilities of IT organizations, the chapter discusses the approaches relevant to a time-horizon perspective. These processes range from short-term activities (such as daily recurring operations or emergency response) to long-range strategy.
It then elaborates on the story behind APM, by expanding on the questions that can be addressed with an APM strategy. Finally, it goes on to discuss what benefits the enterprise can expect to achieve by the implementation of an APM strategy.
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