Author Archive
Pages or people? OpTier has redefined end-user experience monitoring.
End-User Experience Monitoring. Real User Montoring. The key words here are Experience and Real. When you are choosing a solution for monitoring the experience of your customers, partners and employees, it’s critical to keep their perspective in mind.
What’s important to your users – pages or transactions? When you are banking online, and it’s taking a long time to view that suspicious-looking check that you supposedly wrote last week, do you care about the rest of the page? The page probably includes more information about your account activity and enables you to conduct additional transactions like transferring funds and tracking automatic payments. But you may not even know what page you are on. Your only concern is the business transaction that you are currently trying to complete – viewing your cancelled check.
Yet most end-user experience monitors track pages or page objects. Pages are significant to application developers, but they are rarely meaningful to users or the business. Of course we need to track information about pages in order to isolate and resolve problems. But in order to understand the user experience, and to triangulate that with SLAs and business priorities, you need to monitor and measure the performance of business transactions.
Part of the problem with monitoring pages lies in the definition of a page. Technically speaking, a page is a URI, a Unique Resource Identifier. But what the user views as a page may actually be a container displaying a number of URIs. When we are monitoring pages, it’s important to be able to track and analyze the page as a transaction – the way the user experiences it – as well as in its component parts. Given all of this complexity, it’s also important to be able to identify, classify and group the page components automatically, while leveraging as much meaningful information as possible. Otherwise, you are going to spend a lot of time manually “recreating” the application your users experience from an assortment of objects and content items with unrecognizable names.
According to one industry analyst, “One of the key goals in deploying end-user monitoring solutions is to move from an IT-centric view to actually realizing how IT is contributing to business goals. The value of end-user experience information significantly increases if organizations have capabilities for translating application performance metrics into business metrics such as lost revenue opportunities, conversions, the value of transactions failed, application utilization, disruptions of business processes, etc.” By using a Business Transaction Management (BTM) approach to End-User Experience Monitoring, you can evaluate your users “real experience” and measure its impact on your business.
Add comment April 28, 2010
Gartner, Forrester, et al: IT Spending and BTM
It’s no secret that the business transaction management (BTM) market has taken off big time. Whereas just a couple of years ago, OpTier was single-handedly pioneering and educating the market about BTM, today just about every application performance management (APM) vendor is pitching some type of transaction profiling capabilities. The marketing barrage and hype are reaching fever pitch, oftentimes confusing enterprises about what truly constitutes BTM. In a market with inflated expectations, a good industry analyst will help end-user organizations separate the wheat from the chafe and identify the vendors that can deliver the goods. (Whereas the less proficient analyst will focus on creating snazzy yet vapid infographics.)
The good analysts aren’t afraid to ask tough questions and dig down deep into the details of technology, strategy and vision to get to their conclusions. So it’s not without a bit of amusement that we find that the major analyst firms are themselves out of sync in their predictions about the size of overall IT budgets in 2010. Gartner predicts that IT spending will remain flat in 2010, Forrester says IT spending will rebound strongly in 2010, and to round things out, Ovum sees that IT spending will grow only slightly.
And while the analyst groups differ regarding 2010 IT budgets, they all agree about one thing – BTM is growing fast and consuming a larger part of the IT software budget. Forrester has reclassified the APM market to include both APM and BTM, reflecting the increasing role that BTM is playing in managing application performance. And Gartner says that BTM is fundamental because it is the very center of application management.
So it’s no surprise that OpTier closed out Q1 with another blow-out quarter, penetrating into new geographies and vertical markets. Go no further than recent tweets by our SVP of worldwide sales replete with CAPS and lots and lots of exclamation points:
Stay tuned for public announcements of new customer wins and exciting news – we promise to keep the punctuation marks to the bare necessity… (!!!)
Add comment April 19, 2010
The Oscars of Private Cloud Management
It was fun to watch the Academy Awards this year – a glitzy evening replete with glamorous movie stars, stylish attire, and most importantly to those of us from the software industry, totally cool computer-generated characters. (Unless you preferred to spend the evening watching your favorite Super Bowl commercial for the umpteenth time or the latest OK Go video instead.) It’s a night where aspiring actors and screenwriters silently wish that next year they’ll get that break to make it to the Oscars, and we wish we had taken that extra course in computer graphics in college, observing the box-office proceeds from Avatar and Alice in Wonderland.
And while OpTier won’t be releasing a 3-D feature film any time soon, we do believe a multi-dimensional approach is critical to that new genre of enterprise IT service management – managing private clouds. Private clouds are becoming more pervasive – according to Gartner, by 2012 enterprises will spend more than half of their cloud dollars on private cloud services because of improvements in cost and management efficiency.
OpTier BTM provides performance management, resource management, and cost-based accounting for private clouds
That’s where the 3-D approach comes in. Some enterprises erroneously assume that since virtualization is the enabling technology for clouds, then virtualization-centric management systems are sufficient for managing cloud-based services. In effect, they are extending the flawed silo-based APM approach to IT management by applying another one-dimensional toolset to manage virtual hosts and guests in the cloud. (It’s no surprise that in these cases, when a performance issue occurs in the cloud – everyone first blames the “VM guy”.)
OpTier takes a multi-dimensional approach to the cloud. In order to provide true end-to-end service management in the cloud, you need to include visibility into both virtual and physical metrics. Only with a business transactional-based approach do you have 3-D visibility to cover the three key dimensions of transactions that flow through the cloud:
- Time per transaction (i.e. cloud performance management)
- Resource utilization per transaction (i.e. cloud capacity management)
- Cost per transaction (i.e. chargeback and activity-based costing for the cloud)
Frost and Sullivan found that two of the top three concerns about cloud are loss of control and availability. OpTier’s business transaction management approach to private clouds is the most efficient manner to address these concerns – enabling organizations to take control and assure 24/7 availability of services in the cloud.
So the OpTier 3-D feature film may be off in the future, but for some time already, OpTier customers have been using OpTier BTM’s 3-dimensional approach to manage services in the cloud on a daily basis. Now that’s worth an Oscar speech.
Add comment March 7, 2010
Virtualized in Vancouver
We’re fascinated by what’s going on in Vancouver this month. Sure, there’s a lot of drama, action and suspense going on over at the Winter Olympics (such as the valiant efforts of the Jamaican Freestyle Skier to be the first to restore the pride of winter sports to his homeland since the 1988 Jamaican Bobsled team) but we’re even more intrigued by the less mesomorphic young singles cross-town in Vancouver engaging their social skills in a flittering party – flirting virtually with one another through the twitter platform.
For those of you not previously familiar with flittering, it means sending a flirtatious tweet to someone that interests you in the room. And while having the option of flirting online is generally a good thing as it provides a new way for people to find their match, it presents a management challenge – keeping up with the fast pace of the tweets and achieving the visibility to link the virtual (witty tweets) with the physical (cute guy or gal – hopefully).
We find these issues remarkably similar to the management challenges companies face when deploying virtualization. While virtualization presents huge benefits in efficiency gains, it also creates three application management challenges:
- Lost Visibility: Applications become more difficult to manage because virtualization masks the underlying infrastructure layers. It becomes difficult to isolate the problematic tier when a problem occurs, or even understand that a problem is starting to occur before users are impacted. Likewise, it is difficult to determine the impact of VM changes on performance.
- Dynamic Environment: If becomes difficult to keep up with speed of changes in virtual infrastructure. As the folks at EMC call it – “VMotion Sickness”. Then when application performance begins to degrade, people tend to first blame the VM administrator, even if the problem lies elsewhere.
- Overprovisioning: Due to lack of visibility, enterprises often overprovision infrastructure in order to assure performance. Overprovisioning physical hosts (e.g. extra CPU) reduces the cost savings of virtualization.
Virtualization-aware Business Transaction Management addresses these challenges. With OpTier BTM you can regain the visibility lost from virtualization, keep up with changing VMs, and rightsize to maximize cost efficiencies. And while that last sentence would fit into a 140-character tweet, we’re not sure it would get us any dates at the next flittering party.
Add comment February 22, 2010
Business-IT Alignment: When the Saints Come Marching In?
We are delighted for the residents of greater New Orleans who deserve a celebration after their Saints beat the Indianapolis Colts last night in Super Bowl XLIV. The people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region, still recovering from Katrina, have been waiting to take home a Vince Lombardi trophy for the first time since the Saints began to play in 1967.
And while it took the Saints forty-three years to achieve their goals of success, back here in the IT industry it has taken about that long to achieve our version of a Super Bowl win – true business-IT alignment.
There is a lot of talk in the industry about the importance of “aligning IT to business”, “managing IT based on business priorities”, and “monitoring IT infrastructure performance from a business perspective”. The concept of aligning IT with the goals of the business is not new – we’ve been talking about it ever since the first time a computer was used for a business application (by a food manufacturer in the UK!) back in 1950.
Yet, the vendor community has not been able to enable CIOs to meet their goals of B/I alignment. A key factor is that application teams, the folks in IT that liaise with the business and are in the best position to align with their LOB counterparts, are still using infrastructure-based tools to monitor and manage their environment. However, transactions are where IT and the business meet, and only with a transaction-based management approach can IT start to manage services from the business perspective. Business transaction management enables application teams to manage their environment, for the first time, from the perspective of business transactions, rather than from infrastructure metrics. (Many of you will recognize these as the still-unrealized goals of BSM – business service management; see a recent Forrester report on how BTM delivers on the promise of BSM.)
BTM answers the following questions to support B/I alignment:
- Resources: How will moving to the cloud help reduce customer churn or improve employee productivity? What is the business impact of a consolidation project? How will adding new servers or VMs change service levels?
- Process: What is the IT cost per business transaction? Is investment in new infrastructure going towards the most business-critical services? Is business impact factored into decisions for change management and release management?
- Language: Does the LOB care about the performance of silo metrics (e.g. JVM, database) or do they care about the performance of a business transaction — for example, what is the time for a submit order transaction, how long the transaction took to verify the credit card, authorize the user, check inventory, etc., and what will the performance look like when transactions increase by 100%?
Without BTM, you lack the transaction-centric information to answer these questions and are left about as helpless as defending against a Peyton Manning pass. And while the Saints achieved success with 340-pound linemen on their side, all you need is to make the move to BTM.
Add comment February 8, 2010
Cloud Computing: Something New Under the Sun?
As we reflect upon the past decade, many of us will use the 1960’s as the yardstick to measure the intellectual output, creativity, and innovation that was brought into the world over a ten-year period. The music of the Sixties brought us the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel. In film, Hitchcock’s Psycho and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In politics, JFK and Martin Luther King. And in technology, spaceflight, BASIC programming language, and, of course…cloud computing.
The Computer History Museum in Boston recently released a vintage film from 1963 on the topic of timesharing, one of the most important developments in computing, and one which has come in and out of favor several times over the last several decades as the dichotomy between remote and centrally-managed computing resources played out. The latest incarnation for centrally-managed computing resources is none other than cloud computing.
The video is fascinating, demonstrating that while we’ve come a long way in eyewear fashion, the basic paradigms of computing have not changed much over the past 45 years. Watch the video, especially the last 3 minutes, and you’ll hear the MIT professor extol the benefits of shared infrastructure and what sounds familiar to us as elastic computing in the cloud.
And while we’ll agree that there are significant differences between mainframe-based time sharing and cloud computing, it’s key to note that in both computing paradigms, there is need to attain visibility into the performance and resource utilization of what they called “programs” in the video (note the interviewer’s final question about the elapsed time of the transaction,) and what we call business transactions today.
And if you’re interested more in the topic of achieving visibility in the cloud, register for next week’s webinar on the top five capabilities for cloud computing success with special guest Mary Johnston Turner of IDC.
Add comment January 25, 2010
The Top Ten List of the Decade We Didn’t See on the Net
During the final week of our still-nameless decade (if it won’t be called “the zeros” or “the double-naughts”, we’ll vote for the “pre-teens” or the “naughties”) we spent too much time perusing through a plethora of Top 10 lists of the decade. And while we found much to learn from the fact that the top athlete of the decade is off the endorsement circuit thanks to a poorly placed fire hydrant, our attention was piqued by the selection for the top business application of the decade by CIO magazine senior editor Thomas Wailgum.
As a company that is focused on assuring the performance and availability of business applications, we spend a lot of time thinking about the critical applications that drive business for our customers. So we were intrigued to read that the top business application of the decade was not SAP, not salesforce.com, and not event something bought by Oracle. The winner for business application of the decade was Microsoft Excel. This came to us as an epiphany a few days early this year as Wailgum nailed it on the head by identifying that Excel delivers value in every nook and cranny of an organization. The ongoing success of the application is due not only to its feature set but also to its high availability and performance (as long as your PC is working fine ). As more and more applications, including business productivity applications, get served in the cloud, availability and performance become a greater IT challenge.
What’s even more significant to us is that Excel is one of the few applications that is used on a regular basis to share information (e.g. metrics, KPIs, costs) between IT and the business and enable collaboration between these two groups. Which brings us to the Top 10 list of the decade that we didn’t come across. If we had found a list of the decade’s top unfulfilled strategic IT initiatives, near the top would surely be Business/IT alignment. In fact, alignment with business goals has been at the top of the CIO’s New Year’s resolution list since well before the third millennium began.
Ever since Henderson and Venkatraman’s seminal article in the 1970’s, B/I alignment has been recognized as the holy grail in the IT management industry. We here at OpTier believe that our new decade (“the tens?”, “the teens?”, “the aughts?”) will see huge progress in this area thanks to business transaction management. OpTier pioneered BTM back in 2004 and in the past year we have seen IT managers and industry analysts acknowledge the central role that BTM plays in enabling management of services from a business perspective. At the start of this new year, we are well positioned to extend our technological and market share leadership in the BTM market, and we are committed to enable enterprises in the coming decade to fully align IT with their overall business goals.
Happy 2010!
Add comment January 4, 2010
What’s Clear About Net Neutrality
The debate going on in Washington and the blogosphere around Net Neutrality is reaching fever pitch. If you haven’t been following the issue (no doubt due to spending too much time following your local gas station on twitter), it boils down to whether ISPs have the right to control what flows over their pipes or whether Internet users have the right to get unencumbered access to anything out on the Net. We’re especially intrigued by the debate going on in the Network World blogs between Johna Till Johnson and the dynamic duo of Sevcik and Wetzel. (Disclaimer: OpTier is a member of the Apdex alliance led by Peter Sevcik.)
Which brings us to our point that we can’t wait until someone buys the assets of Clear Corporate and restores the service. Clear is the company that created the speedy security lanes in the airport for those of us who hate to stand in long lines. Bidding is currently on to buy Clear’s assets from Morgan Stanley who took possession of the company when it went bust. (Note to our CFO: Don’t use money invested by Morgan Stanley in OpTier to make bid for Clear.)
You may be asking what Net Neutrality has to do with Clear. The answer, of course, is prioritization. Prioritization of data flowing over the network. Priority of people in airport security lines (very busy and important businesspeople, mind you). We here at OpTier think a lot about prioritization – prioritization of troubleshooting activities when outages occur, prioritization of infrastructure spending to maintain service levels, prioritization of virtualization deployments, and in general, prioritization of IT management in order to best support the goals of the business.
We believe prioritization is at the heart of the BTM approach and that’s what sets OpTier apart from the traditional APM vendors, even as they start to talk about business transactions in their pitches. While these vendors are cobbling together a group of silo monitoring tools using correlation techniques, we believe that true BTM means complete visibility into how every single business transaction executes from the end-user across all IT components with a complete breakdown of latency, resource consumption and SLA compliance.
Now that’s even worth waiting in line for.
Add comment October 12, 2009
Google wants to make the web faster. Good news for the enterprise?
Raise your hand if you’re nostalgic for the days of waiting for web pages to load. That’s right, the days of going to make coffee while you wait for Netscape to load pictures of your five-year old niece’s birthday party on Geocities. We’ve come a long way since the “World Wide Wait” and thankfully today we take for granted instant access to high bandwidth services such as video and browser-based SaaS.
Well, the good folks at Google want to speed up the web even more, and are using their bully pulpit to get the industry to make the web faster. Their focus on improving web performance centers around four areas for improvement:
- Web pages are slow due to suboptimal use of Javascript, CSS, compression, etc.
- Web servers are often not optimized for speed
- TCP, HTML and other protocols, designed 10+ years ago, do not meet today’s requirements
- Users are not using the latest set of speed-enhanced browsers
While addressing these four issues will go a long way towards improving performance of access to rich media and on-demand applications, it misses the mark for what’s needed to improve performance for web based services that are built upon a multi-tier architecture. Business applications, e-commerce applications, and enterprise portals are typically deployed with a complex set of tiers behind the web server through which transactions flow.
Google’s primary focus on streamlining the flow between the browser and the web server may serve the needs for many consumer web applications (think faster Youtube and Google Docs), but ignores the needs of businesses that are working to improve the performance of their transaction flows end to end. As we’ve said here before, the value of true Business Transaction Management (BTM) is the visibility it provides into all transactions across all tiers–from the clients and web servers, to the application servers, load balancers, databases, mainframes, authentication servers, message busses, ginsu knives, and any other tiers in the environment—in order to optimize the flow of these transactions.
While we laud Google’s efforts to speed up the web, it seems to us another example of how Google’s approach to software doesn’t work for enterprises. We’ve got our own ideas for how to “make the business service faster” through standards, enhanced vendor collaboration, and a business-centric approach to IT management. More on that in future posts.
Add comment July 2, 2009
Lindsay Diamond
Assaf Amit
Andy Wetzel
Stephen Burton
Russell Rothstein
Motti Tal
Marie-Pierre Belanger
cpennoptier
Linh C. Ho
