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Concerned about Application Performance in the Cloud? Ask These Questions First
By Russell Rothstein
February 22, 2011
Many companies are developing their strategy for migration of business applications to private and public clouds. During this critical stage, it is vital to ensure that service levels are not impacted by migrating the application from dedicated to shared IT resources. It’s no wonder that according to analyst firm IDC, two of the top three concerns that CIO’s have about private clouds are performance and availability.
We see in the market that enterprises are forming new cloud teams and internal committees, with a diverse set of skills, to plan for an effective organizational cloud strategy. One of their mandates in the organization’s journey to cloud is to plan for how to monitor and manage the performance and behavior of applications after deployment. These organizations undoubtedly have a range of infrastructure monitors in the data center. And most cloud service providers, whether internal or external, will provide services for monitoring cloud resources. Yet these tools typically do not provide an accurate picture of what end users are truly experiencing and how to quickly isolate and fix performance issues in application components located inside and/or outside the cloud.
This blog entry points out a few of the key application performance challenges that you are likely to encounter when pursuing a cloud strategy, so that you can address them proactively. I hope that during my session in the Cloud Performance Summit at CloudConnect (Instrumenting Applications When Access Goes Away on Monday March 7) the esteemed panel will address some of these challenges with a variety of perspectives – it should be informative and thought-provoking!
1. How do you know if an application is ready for the cloud?
Not all applications are ready for “cloud time”, and sometimes one part of an application is cloud ready while other components are not. You need to identify the best components for migration as well as potential problems such as chattiness and latency that are amplified in the cloud.
2. How do you find server-related root causes when performance issues arise?
In fully-dedicated environments, we sometimes use infrastructure metrics and events to diagnose performance issues. But inferring application performance from tier-based statistics becomes challenging – if not impossible – when applications share dynamically allocated resources. In the cloud, you must be able to understand application performance and its correlation with the underlying physical and virtual components.
3. How can you minimize the risk of change to the cloud infrastructure or the application?
In a shared environment, any change to the application, or to the infrastructure, is high risk. Cloud owners, operations staff and application teams must be able to test the impact of change on service delivery – whether that change is in an application before deployment, or in the cloud infrastructure.
4. How do you implement or verify chargeback?
Traditional application performance monitoring (APM) tools do not collect resource utilization per transaction to enable business-aligned costing and chargeback paradigms. For the cloud, you need a solution that monitors consumption for every service across multiple applications and tiers, so you can accurately cost services, decide on appropriate chargeback schemes, and tune applications and infrastructure for better resource utilization and lower cost.
5. How do you ensure that services are allocated according to business priority?
To ensure that SLAs in the cloud are met, you must be able to prioritize the allocation of resources based on measurements of real end user performance and an accurate view of where additional resources can truly alleviate SLA risks. To make that possible, you need a clear picture of resource consumption at the transaction level and business intelligence about the impact of each infrastructure tier on performance.
6. How can you maintain a real-time up-to-date view of how each service flows through the cloud when VMs are moving around dynamically?
In the cloud more than ever, you need a real-time picture of service dependencies that does not need to be manually updated. The environment is simply too dynamic (e.g. so called “VMotion sickness”) to make it feasible to keep manual models and static infrastructure dependency maps up to date.
7. How can you right-size capacity and prevent over-provisioning that undercuts ROI?
In the cloud, a complete history of all transaction instances, including precise resource utilization metrics and SLAs, is essential for making intelligent decisions about provisioning. And with an accurate picture of resource consumption for each business transaction, cloud owners can plan future capacity requirements (e.g. servers, storage, VMs, databases) in the most cost-efficient manner possible.
February 22, 2011 at 3:47 pm Russell Rothstein Leave a comment
How Clouds will change Business Transaction Management
by Anonymous, January 2011.
I hate clouds, they generally deliver cold weather and make life dull. I especially hate them even more because they’ve recently made my job more difficult (and working in product management it’s not exactly plain sailing at the best of times). I did try my best to avoid Cloud Computing by simply pretending it was all madness. Sadly, this naive approach didn’t work and here I am writing a blog on the subject.
For anyone whose tried to decipher cloud computing I will hereby explain what the Mary Poppins is going on and how it’s going to impact IT management and specifically BTM over the next few years. I will start by saying that things are going to get more complex and significant challenges are ahead for vendors who are looking to provide next generation IT management software. There are several acronyms you need to understand as well so I’ll get cracking:
Private Clouds – think of these as on-premise utility/grid computing with the virtualization of OS and application run-time environments across the enterprise. An example might be a grid of 500 J2EE servers which are virtualized and shared across hundreds of different applications within an enterprise.
Public Clouds – this is simply off-premise utility computing provided by a 3rd party vendor. For example, Amazon EC2 or Rackspace where businesses can buy computing resource on-demand which are accessed remotely across the internet (hence it being public).
SaaS – Software As A Service. Enterprise Applications that are hosted on the internet by a 3rd party vendor. For example, Salesforce.com, Success Factors or GoogleMail where businesses log into a website that provides them with specific services that aid their business.
PaaS – Platform As A Service. Application Run-time platforms that are provided by 3rd party vendors across the internet. For example, Google App Engine or Salesforce.com’s AppExchange. The ability for business to build new applications using 3rd party frameworks or run-time environments. For example, many businesses will store their customer data within Salesforce.com, using AppExchange they can build new applications on top of this data.
IaaS – Infrastructure As A Service. Essentially the same as Public clouds where businesses can buy servers or computing power on demand from a 3rd party hosting provider.
Hybrid Cloud – combination of all of the above.
- More complexity on the way
Some of the above is probably common knowledge and I’m betting someone will comment on this blog telling me the above descriptions are not entirely accurate. The key problem with the above is that enterprise applications are going to become more fragmented and distributed across multiple deployment platforms which are not all controlled by the customer. To add to this we’ve just had a decade of SOA projects which essentially increased the number of dependencies between applications so when a user executes a business transaction these days it’s likely to pass through several application architectures. Why is this important? It multiples the complexity and demands of IT management software which up until now has still struggled to monitor and manage single applications let alone multiple connected applications. In summary a blackbox application becomes a blackbox of blackboxes with multiple points of failure and dependencies. Visibility of how the business (transactions) executes across these blackboxes therefore becomes key to effectively managing the business and IT. Business Transaction Management solutions will be key to providing this much needed visibility across the many types of blackboxes regardless of whether they’re in a data centre, in a cloud or being managed by a 3rd party vendor. You can only manage and control what you can see, as many enterprise applications move to the cloud its critical customers maintain their visibility of how their business executes across IT.
CEP doesn’t have to be complex
By Anonymous, January 2011.
One of my favourite sports is Formula 1. For the unfamiliar it involves 22 cars racing flat out at over 200mph with drivers bums 2mm from the ground with many of them crashing and going up in flames (see below). It differs from traditional Nascar racing in the fact it has these things called “corners” which make it more tricky for the drivers to overtake. Formula 1 is a big business with many teams spending over £150 million plus a year to make their car faster than everyone else. It’s a global sport with significant sponsorship, TV revenue and an opportunity for car manufacturers to compete. To say business impact doesn’t occur in Formula 1 is pretty much the same as saying no-one gets hurt in boxing.
All Businesses can go up in flames
So how do these teams minimize business impact and make their cars finish races? Firstly they have a lot of talented people whose job it is to design, develop, test and support these cars that cost £1.5 million each. Secondly they are experts in monitoring and improving one important metric: performance. Each car has 2,500 metres of wiring and over 250 sensors which continuously monitor the performance of car components in real-time. The data from these sensors is often known as “telemetry” which are fed into a computer and then analyzed by test or race engineers. Over a race distance millions of events are captured from each car and are used by the pit wall to help their cars finish the race. Engine temps, tyre temps, brake wear, hydraulic pressure, tyre pressures, brake temps, clutch wear – the list is endless. The job of the race engineers and their computers is to spot which events matter so they can take pro-active action (Complex Event Processing). They make definitive decisions to directly increase the performance and reliability of their car so it can finish the race as high as it possibly can. For example, if tyre pressures are low it could mean a number of things from a simple slow puncture to a problem with the brakes which is causing tyre temps to drop thus impacting tyre pressure. The last thing a Formula 1 team want to do is pit their car so they need process and analyse multiple events to make the right decision. Just like failing businesses go out of business so does Formula 1 teams with the recent departures of BMW, Toyota and Honda.
A formula 1 car must be fast and reliable for its team to be successful. The same principle can be applied to any business out there that has mission critical applications or business services. Slow performance and outages have a direct business impact. The only difference is that there is probably a lot more wiring (networks) and sensors (agents) used to monitor every angle of an application through the various OSI layers. Complex Event Processing engines add significant benefit to gaining meaningful real-time intelligence from data that is collected. It allowing monitoring solutions to become smarter with the data they collect and present, it also makes monitoring solutions aware of data from other sources that may explain why specific events are being observed. For example, if an application tier goes down the monitoring solution may throw an alert. However, if this was planned downtime or a change request then the tier outage is perfectly valid. With CEP capabilities it’s possible to build simple rules that prevent false positives and alert storming. For example, a CEP engine can process a tier outage event and then query the change management repository to see if downtime is planned, if not it can then alert to say the tier has been verified down. This is just a very simple example of how a CEP engine can significantly enhance traditional IT monitoring solutions.
In fact, the power of CEP is exactly why OpTier recently introduced its Business Events module (BEM) so our customers can gain better intelligence into what is impacting their business. In the same way we use the market leading Oracle database to persist our data we use a market leading CEP engine to process events from the millions of business transactions we collect each day. For every business transaction captured we know which application, business process, user, location, tiers and protocols it touched along with the KPI such as latency, resource and SLA for those respective entities. So if a user from an unauthorized IP subnet executes a business transaction we can detect it in real-time and notify the application security team. Again, just a simple example of how CEP capabilities can enhance Business Transaction Management.
What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas and this blog
By Linh C. Ho
Last week I put on my blue suede shoes and spent the week in viva Las Vegas! I was attending Gartner’s 29th annual data center and IT operations conference—of course. To no one’s surprise, the main theme of the conference was around cloud computing and virtualization. Over 2000 IT professionals marched up and down the Caesars Palace between sessions, analyst one-on-ones, and perhaps a round of black jack by the dancing dolls 
Without a doubt, trends to watch were on the horizon – some of the top trends I picked up from one of the keynotes are:
- Virtualization is just starting: it is not a one-time project, it’s a process! the number of virtualized PCs will grow from less than 5 million in 2007 to 660 million by 2011.
- Big data – big elephant or was it gorilla in the room? Storage continues to grow at an average of 50% to 60% CAGR in most enterprises.
- Energy efficiency and monitoring: data centers can consume 40 to 100 times more energy than offices they support! Big need to measure and report on consumption!
- Unified communication and collaboration: incorporate mobile devices into the enterprise!
- Staff retention and retraining: how do you keep staff from leaving? The US department of labor estimates that today’s labor force will have 10-14 jobs by the age of 38!
- Social networks: don’t band Facebook, Youtube or Twitter from your staff! Did you know more video was uploaded to youtube in the last 2 months than ABC, CBS, NBC had been airing new content since 1948?? (OpTier uploaded 4 in the last month!) check em’ out!
- Cloud computing: it reduces operating expenses, improves agility –yes great hype but focus on results!
While the name of the game was to count how many times the word ‘cloud’ gets mentioned in a session, I was keeping an ear out for ‘OpTier’. The topics of interest were application performance management, end-user experience, ITILv3, CMDB/CMS, business service management, virtualization and (drum roll) cloud.
Few additional things I’ve picked up from the sessions:
- User defined transaction flow or Business Transaction Management (BTM) is the most popular inquiry in application management area in 2010. (DING! For OpTier!)
- Warning of small niche deep-dive vendors in Java/.NET claiming to do BTM! –they don’t!
- Application Performance Management (APM) continues to be a hot area:
- 2009 APM inquiries: 650
- 2010 APM inquiries to date: 700+
- 2009 APM market size: $1.5B
- 2010 APM market size ~$2B (with 10% annual growth going forward – only virtualization management is growing faster)
- End-user Experience management continues to be a hot priority (DING! For OpTier!)
- A lot more emphasis on ITIL and process improvement from Gartner this year. I believe they even hired a new analyst to cover ITIL. This must be a reflection of the US adoption. While Gartner shows that over 30% are 3-5 years into ITIL, the majority of the audience is at maturity level 2 or 3. This means that enterprises are becoming more process-centric and proactive rather than reactive.
- Investment in managing cloud is mostly in private cloud only, very little <5% investment in managing public cloud.
All and all, I have found the conference very informative and worthwhile! I have been going to this conference for many years, this was by far the biggest datacenter show I’ve seen. Viva Las Vegas!
Cloud Requires a New IT Employee (Hint: MBA May Be Required)
We've come a long way since the IBM 3270. Or have we?
By Russell Rothstein
December 6, 2010
In today’s economy with sluggish job creation, there’s much talk about the change in skills required in today’s workforce. Drill down into the world of IT operations management, and there is an even greater shift happening, related not to the economy, but to cloud computing. The rapid adoption of private cloud architectures is creating ripple effects, not only on the way IT delivers services to its customers, but also on the types of skills IT requires to support these new architectures.
Cloud computing is heralding the most significant shift in IT skill sets since we displaced the armies of punch card operators with the IBM 3270. Cloud is a realization of utility computing, where whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand. As Gartner says in a recent report, private cloud services “will require a cultural and political change inside of IT to see the role of operations move to being more proactive — requiring predefined policies, service levels and automated actions to take on the runtime environment, as opposed to the manual initiation of scripts or workflows. This requires very different skills over time — a shift away from rote work toward more planning, service analysis and a better understanding of service users in order to continually improve how the service is ultimately delivered.” (Source: Gartner “Key Considerations in the Development of a Private Cloud Architecture”, August 23, 2010).
The key phrase used by Gartner is that IT personnel will require “a better understanding of service users”, which means a better understanding the business which is what’s driving the users to consume those IT services. In essence, cloud will necessitate IT to be more business focused. We have been talking about Business/IT alignment for too long now without sufficient progress; with the emergence of cloud models, this is no longer a choice – either IT upgrades to a business-centric service delivery function, or is ultimately to be replaced by outsourced cloud service providers that can provide utility computing services with greater cost efficiencies. That’s why Business Transaction Management, or BTM, must be at the center of your cloud management capabilities, in order to effectively plan for and manage cloud services from a business perspective. In an upcoming blog post, we’ll get the opinions from CIOs in the industry to understand their plans to address this rapidly changing environment.
To close up, it’s interesting to understand the new roles in IT that Gartner sees as emerging in order to support the delivery of new private cloud services:
- Cloud service architect (new role): Designs and documents the end-to-end cloud platform
- Portal developer: Develops interfaces that cloud consumers use to requisition services
- Workflow specialist: Defines requirements for instantiating automated processes
- Configuration management specialist: Develops consistent packaging and policy-conflict-free service deployment methods
We trust you are already filling these roles in your IT organization. And while these may not be the best the job in the world, but they most certainly beat a career as a roustabout.
December 6, 2010 at 3:14 pm Russell Rothstein Leave a comment
iBTM – Business Transaction Management for the iPhone
By Anonymous, 28th October 2010.
Those of you who read my “Another less is more blog for ITSM and BSM solutions” blog back in October of last year will remember my bitterness around owning a BlackBerry whilst the entire nation around me was stroking their iPhones. Well in the last twelve months I finally managed to come up with a cunning way of acquiring an iPhone. My plan was simple, build an iPhone application for my company’s Business Transaction Management solution and then kindly request an iPhone from my company to perform user acceptance testing on. This plan sounds all very simple but there is a catch, I would have to write the PRD for this iPhone application along with finding a developer to help me build it (my developer days faded back in 2005). Bearing in mind I’ve never used iOS or stroked an iPhone I set out to do some market research to help me define a set of requirements and screen designs.
So where did you think I looked first? www.formula1.com . Yes, I’m mental and obsessed with cars but believe it or not this turned out to be the best bit of research I’ve done. Three hours after visiting the Formula1 website and downloading their application from the AppStore I had the iBTM PRD nailed with use cases, requirements and screen designs. The thing that struck me the most with the F1 app was how easy and simple it was to find the information I was looking for. In a stroke and two clicks I could go from a race to a session to live timing on track, the information was presented so clearly even a goldfish could keep up with what was happening in the race. So my initial thoughts for iBTM were “wouldn’t it be cool to go from an Application to a Business Transaction to its Tiers in two clicks”. In the same way Formula1 delivers timing of drivers lap times and sectors I could do the same with Applications, Transactions and Tier timing along with their SLA status. A user could view a list of their applications, spot an SLA breach, click on an application and view its business transactions, check which business transaction was breaching and click again to view the Tier latency/SLA management to see what was causing those breaches. I could also allow a user to start from an alert so they could go Alert > Application > Transaction > Tiers and understand what caused the alert in seconds. Here is my screen PRD mock-ups for the App:
So how does it work? Simply put, we built the app using the iPhone SDK (thanks to our superstar developer Mark Berner!), then we built a web services API for our BTM management servers (we allow federation) that allows iBTM to communicate so it can query information from OpTier BTM. Connectivity wise iPhone’s now come with comprehensive VPN capabilities that allow iPhones to connect to corporate networks either through 3G or WiFi. We’ve been testing connectivity and response times from all over the world and iBTM is super fast no matter where your accessing it from (it actually doesn’t retrieve that much data). With the recent hype around iPads life got sweeter as iBTM runs just fine with the standard x2 zoom you get for native iPhone applications. Here is a photo of an iPad working with iBTM connecting to one of our test BTM management servers:
iBTM works on the iPad and iPhone
Feedback from analysts, customers and prospects has been very encouraging. We’ve seen several executives get really hyped over a simple application that provides them with powerful visibility and intelligence into their business transactions, infrastructure and application performance. In two clicks an Executive or Application Owner can determine business impact and isolate which part of IT is causing SLA breaches all from the comfort of their iPhone or iPad. We’re already working on v2 of iBTM so stay tuned! Watch my youtube overview of iBTM:
You can download OpTier iBTM from the Apple AppStore.
iBlog: OpTier Raises the Bar, Again, for Application Performance Management with New Product Release!
By Linh C. Ho
OpTier announces the new version of OpTier BTM 4, delivering business-centric APM, end user experience management and diagnostics in one complete, flexible, and rapidly deployed solution.
Listen to this podcast to gain insight into what challenges OpTier BTM 4 addresses, the value it brings to customers and what cool capabilities it offers — all in this comprehensive solution for end-to-end business transaction management.
OpTier, the Company that Defined BTM — Forrester
By Linh C. Ho
Forrester recognizes OpTier as the company that defined BTM and already delivers capabilities that meet new market shift
Forrester today broadcasted the results of their Application Performance Management (APM) and Business Transaction Management (BTM) analysis. In this webcast that supplemented their recent research paper called: Competitive Analysis: APM and BTM – Forrester brings some clarity on the different technologies and approaches on the market, even though most share similar goal of helping IT manage the complexity of business services. Forrester analyzes 25 vendors and provides some guidance in product selection with a SWOT analysis (Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) for all these vendors. In this report, Forrester recognizes OpTier for being:
- The pioneer and the company that defined BTM
- Already on the future path of APM-BTM-and Complex Events Processing or CEP convergence as OpTier advances its technology to be closer to the business
- The established reference for BTM.
OpTier BTM is the market leading solution for enterprise clients looking for immediate value for multiple stakeholders: business line managers, process owners, IT operations, application owners and support, QA and development. In a single solution, OpTier BTM:
- provides the most dimensions/views to help IT or the business understand impact and quickly isolate problem areas
- automatically discovers and dynamically maps transaction/application dependencies (great of CMDB projects!) via its real-time living topology
- manages application performance and business transactions in real-time, 24/7
- helps analyze change-impact for any new initiatives such as virtualization and cloud
- is flexible to tailor rich data sets for strategic corporate or executive dashboards with business KPIs
- provides resource utilization and cost metrics for capacity planners (with business transaction and application context) – great for provisioning and planning around cloud/virtualization
Forrester positioned OpTier in the true Business Transaction Management category and in the APM-BTM-CEP convergence as the market shifts! This is why leading corporations such as Deutsche Bank, Wachovia, Avery Dennison, Blue Cross Blue Shields and many more bank on OpTier as the trusted advisor to partner with and evolve with as business needs change.
Moving Transactions to the Cloud?
By Linh C. Ho
Recently, I was interviewed by Joe McKendrick of Insurance Networking News. Joe wanted to know our thoughts on the challenges when it comes to business transactions and the cloud, and how can enterprises mitigate risks of impacting their business. It also became apparent that conservative industries such as insurance (at least more conservative than their peers in banking or others), will be late adopters of the cloud. In the article we discuss how claims, medicare, actuarial and any critical service that is either revenue-generating or client-impacting will just have to wait unless insurers have the ability to ensure minimal to no disruption to the business and their end-users’ experience.
Webinar sur demande
Par Linh C. Ho
Webinar sur demande:
Combler les lacunes de la gestion de la performance applicative
Amener de la valeur commerciale à l’IT est plus facile à dire qu’a faire. De nombreuses entreprises ont la plupart ou tous les outils de monitoring qui promettaient une approche basée sur la gestion de la performance applicative de bout-en-bout. Toutefois, la plupart n’ont pas tenu leurs promesses.
Mon webinar sur demande avec Jean Pierre Garbani analyste du cabinet Forrester donnera un aperçu de :
• Quelle est la différence entre APM, BSM, BTM ?
• Qu’est ce que vous apportent les outils de monitoring d’aujourd’hui ?
• Qu’est ce que les outils de gestion de la performance applicative ne vous apportent pas ?
• Comment créer de la valeur commerciale pour l’IT et qui soit significative pour le Business ?
• L’importance d’apporter l’impact business en temps réel à l’IT
Pour vous enregister: http://bit.ly/dpFbkV
OpTier
Assaf Amit
Andy Wetzel
Russell Rothstein
Motti Tal
Linh C. Ho
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