How This Book Is Organized

Although this book could be read cover to cover, it is designed to be flexible and allow you to easily move between chapters and sections of chapters to cover just the material that you need more work with.

The book is separated into five logical parts that cover the areas of defining your business requirements, application deployment, and troubleshooting. The whole story is put together with several case studies at the book's conclusion.

Part I, "A Comprehensive Approach to Managing Networked Business Applications," provides a context for the book, explaining how suggested best practices support each other, and where they fit in terms of who, when, where, and why.

Chapter 1, "The Case for Application Performance Management"To solve performance problems effectively or to forecast computing and networking resource requirements proactively, you must understand how applications consume system and network resources. 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. This chapter addresses the need for application performance management (APM), going on to cover how APM can be applied through every aspect of the application life cycle, and the benefits such an implementation can bring.

Part II, "Aligning the Network's Business and Technical Requirements," covers the relationship between business and technical requirements to successfully align the business model.

Chapter 2, "Understanding Your Business"To be successful in today's competitive marketplace, organizations need an advantage, the kind they can get using Internet technology to solve critical business challenges. By addressing what defines a business-critical application, this chapter discusses business solutions that span industries and geography.
Chapter 3, "Detailing the Business Transaction"This chapter covers the details of how to profile the application identified and defined in the previous chapter. This chapter helps readers characterize those parts of the business transaction that should be handled and monitored, identifying which parts are active and time sensitive (and which parts are not), ensuring that protocols and policies are correctly applied. It covers profiling applications in a lab environment (predeployment) and applications already in operation that need to be optimized to improve the delivery.
Chapter 4, "Service Level Management"Service level management (SLM) involves the task of defining specific performance agreements expected from the network. The agreement defines certain performance metrics used to measure the actual service level obtained from the network against the stated level of service in a service level agreement (SLA). It is a common agreement between the provider of a service and the recipient of the service. The metrics for network performance can include response time and availability. This chapter shows that by using a combination of application performance data and the establishment of a baseline, SLM can be used to assist in defining (and subsequent monitoring of) the SLA.
Chapter 5, "QoS and MPLS: Tools to Manage Application Performance"This chapter discusses classifying of applications and assigning the correct QoS mechanism to each. It also explains the emergence and importance of label switching and Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) in a network infrastructure. It explains the problems associated with conventional IP routing procedures and introduces the idea and importance of label switching to QoS.

Parts III, "Deploying and Monitoring Network Applications," and IV, "Planning and Troubleshooting Network Applications," look at two perspectives of the application story. Part III addresses application deployment, as well as the basics of application performance monitoring. This part covers aspects related to the deployment of new applications, as well as setting up the overall performance management systems.

Chapter 6, "Application Deployment"This chapter covers how to build up an accurate baseline. It then discusses using this baseline to ascertain the impact on the environment, including rolling out an application and projecting upgrades to both application and infrastructure.
Chapter 7, "Beyond the Boundaries"This chapter discusses approaches to situations in which you only operate (own) part of your delivery mechanism and must rely on third-party organizations to deliver your application to both your customers and internal staff. The chapter covers ways to work within these parameters.
Chapter 8, "Monitoring the Delivery"Having gone to the trouble of optimizing your application, you need to ensure that the delivery criteria you intended and expect is initially achieved and then maintained. This chapter addresses how to monitor the delivery, discussing what metrics should be referenced and how that data should be reported on to achieve your desired result.

Part IV assumes the reader is now working with a deployed application in a production environment and covers aspects of ongoing planning in such an environment, as well as the inevitable troubleshooting side of application performance.

Chapter 9, "Proactive Planning"This chapter covers proactive planning to ensure that you maintain the delivery criteria your business-critical applications require.
Chapter 10, "When Applications Fail"To manage faults, you need to discover, isolate, and correct problems. This chapter discusses how the user can employ Cisco best practices that facilitate fault discovery (using, for example, the system monitoring commands) to isolate problems with the system test commands and resolve problems with other commands, including debug commands. This chapter then lays out a troubleshooting methodology in which you can use this information. It discusses the importance of identifying and assigning responsibility for problem resolution, discussing the general default root approach instead of using predetermined metrics to allocate responsibility.

Taking all the lessons thus far, Part V, "Practical Implementations," presents case studies that combine both design and performance issues.

Chapter 11, "Business Aligning Case Studies"This chapter is composed of case studies reinforcing the material discussed in Chapters 1 through 10. The first case study focuses more on the business side of the process and shows how to define and profile the business-critical application. It finishes up with a description of the characteristics learned, and discusses how they can be used in the ongoing process and future troubleshooting exercises. The second case study shows how to take the information and relate it to produce a realistic SLA. It covers subjects such as metric definition, collection points, and thresholds to demonstrate good, poor, and bad performance. The third case study addresses the optimization of a single transaction in a banking environment. Finally, the fourth case study addresses the addition of QoS mechanisms to optimize the deliver of a voice-based application.
Chapter 12, "Optimizing Application Delivery in Storage-Based Networking, Wireless LANs, and an End-to-End Model"Basic design is considered very important in any optimization methodology. No amount of optimization will compensate for a poor base design. This chapter concentrates on the design issues and considerations with methodology approaches for storage-area networks, wireless LANs, and an end-to-end model.