Posts Tagged APM
BTM 2.0 | My Thoughts
Stephen Burton, 29th June 2010
Business Transaction Management (BTM) this year became 5 years old. It’s currently the new kid on the block and has subsequently forced many APM vendors to switch their strategy to focus on a more business centric value proposition around business transactions rather than their legacy of monitoring IT silo’s. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find an APM vendor these days who isn’t talking about business transactions and their crusade around “End to End” performance management. From my perspective BTM 1.0 has been delivered to the market and I’m very much looking forward to contributing to the next generation of BTM capabilities, let’s call it BTM 2.0 for arguments sake.
BTM 1.0 in my opinion was about providing visibility of all business transactions across all tiers all of the time to allows customers to manage IT from a business perspective. BTM 1.0 implementations typically focused on a single mission critical application or “business service” (if we’re looking at things from the business perspective) in a production environment where business impact is real and pain is felt the most. Customers who experience BTM 1.0 see things they’ve never seen before, this is why more and more IT mgmt vendors are keen to develop or acquire BTM capabilities. Whilst BTM 1.0 is coming to market nicely I’m already thinking of the future and where BTM is heading.
BTM 1.0 - End to End for an Application
For customers who thought BTM 1.0 was good, things are about to get better as they’ll be more unique visibility on the way with BTM 2.0. Why? Because customers are telling me they want to see the complete picture of their inter-connected business services (and if you’ve read my previous blogs – the customer is always right). The pervasiveness of Service Orientated Architectures (SOA) has been very visible from the customers I’ve been chatting to. Combine the last five years of SOA with customer’s recent consideration around cloud computing and you really begin to understand why complete visibility of inter-connected business services along with their dependencies is becoming critical to IT mgmt. When a business service relies upon another business service or several business services customers need complete visibility of these dependencies so they can understand and manage the business services and business transactions that is really impacting their end user experience and ultimately their business. Without this visibility customers today are managing their business services in a silo’d approach which is fine if youe business services have no dependencies with other business services or they don’t run on a grid, utility or shared services environment. If they do have dependencies, run on shared services or are distributed across data centres and/or in clouds then they’re going to need good visibility in order to manage them effectively. This is where I believe BTM 2.0 will help customers; once again helping them see things they’ve never seen before so they can make smarter decisions and manage IT more effectively with complete visibility of how the business runs on IT. When a business transaction is executed by a user the customer should have full visibility of how that business transaction interacted with other business services and the infrastructure which underpins them. Seeing a complete jigsaw is better than seeing the pieces individually laid out, in my opinion BTM needs to provide the complete jigsaw view.
BTM 2.0 - End to End for the Enterprise
I’m looking forward to making BTM 2.0 happen with our customers, tracking business transactions across one business service is done, tracking business transactions across multiple business services is where it’s now at. End to End is about to shift from the application perspective to an enterprise perspective and I can’t wait to see what topologies we’ll be drawing for our customers over the next 18 months.
Add comment June 29, 2010
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
Building a next generation BTM UI
by Stephen Burton, 20th April 2010.
It’s the day after we put the finishing touches to a brand new BTM UI and I feel like I’ve gone 12 rounds with Mike Tyson. It’s true what they say though, No Pain No Gain. I’ve been on the ropes, been knocked down several times but like Elton John says “I’m still standing”. A new baby is born and its certainly not an ugly one. I am expecting a few tears though when our field organization and customers gets their hands on it and start to shake it for the first time.
To be precise or wily it’s taken 18 months, 125 pages, 50+ detailed designs, 65 flights (most to Tel Aviv), 50+ customer meetings/webex’s, thousands of emails, hundreds of arguments, thousands of beers (5 beers per argument) and a good few hundred bugs. All for the sake of Business Transaction Management. Has it been worth it? Absolutely.
About 18 months ago OpTier made a decision to build a next generation BTM user interface. It was becoming increasingly clear from customers and prospects that the value of BTM touched many stakeholders in the business and IT. Our previous GUI was more focused towards the technical audience being application support teams and application developers. When you track all transactions across all tiers all of the time and provide response time, SLA and resource consumption metrics by Application, Transaction, User, Location and Tiers you end up collecting a lot of valuable information. The problem is how do you show all this information to the right user in the right context? What is relevant for an application owner isn’t always relevant for an application support team or a capacity planner. Showing a technical view to a business stakeholder is like an English person receiving an Hebrew menu in an Israeli restaurant (not good when you’re hungry). Therefore one of the first decisions we made was to make our BTM GUI role based so we could support a variety of users and use cases. Simply put, a user logs in and is presented with a series of “activities” relevant to their role. Each activity (e.g. problem isolation) has a series of tailored views which allows the user to perform that activity using information which is only relevant to that user. For example, a business user is typically interested in business transaction volume, activity and SLA compliance – they don’t really care about CPU usage, tier chattiness or how many I/O operations happen when a business transaction is executed.
The second key decision we made was to make the GUI extensible from both an architecture and user perspective. It’s obviously good to provide out of the box roles, activities and views for our customers. However, the needs of every customer and user is different no matter how hard you try to support every use case. Therefore users can simply create their own roles, activities and views to make BTM information more relevant to them incorporating their own context, terminology and processes. With 13 dimensions (application, transaction, users, locations, tiers, …), 100+ available metrics, 3 working modes, 10 different visualizations (table, charts, clouds, GoogleMaps, …) and a slick graphic design built on top of Flex technology the possibilities to our users are now endless. In the current beta release we support 10 BTM activities with over 75 different BTM views, if users want something different they can go right ahead and create whatever activity and view they wish. Over the next 18 months we’ll be adding more dimensions, metrics and visualization that will help customers truly manage IT from a business perspective, the future is bright.
The last key decision was to outsource the whole usability and graphic design aspects of our GUI. OpTier specializes in tracking transactions across tiers, it does not specialize in designing user interfaces. BTM is our business, usability is someone else’s business (Puzzlehead in this case). I can tell you right now though usability is a political hot potato. Get 2 people in the same room and you’ll get two different opinions on what is intuitive, get 25 people in the room and you’ll get 25 different opinions. You’d be surprised how many times I heard the words “When I used to develop GUI we did it like this…”. As Einstein once said “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. When you work with a usability company you’re implicitly trusting them to do the right thing based on your inputs and feedback. Unless your open minded with usability experts you’ll always look to the past instead of looking into the future. What was relevant 10 years ago in GUI might not be relevant in 2010. GUI from my perspective is more art than science, it has to capture the imagination and invite the user to play. Larry Ellison once said “When you innovate you’ve got to be prepared for people to tell you you’re crazy.”
Like anything which is brand new though, we’ll have our issues. I’m not naïve enough to think that our new GUI will be perfect from day one, it’s a significant improvement and departure from our existing GUI. We’ll be able to show more value than we could have possibly imagined 18 months ago with our previous GUI. Our users can access BTM value in a single click depending on what they are trying to accomplish. You want to see your application CPU consumption over time? Click on this view. You want to understand the business impact of the release you’ve just released to production? Click on this view. You want to see the individual transactions user X executed? Click on this view.
I see this GUI as the start of something new and exciting rather than the end of just another GUI project. GUI’s should evolve and provide users with something fresh, unique and exciting. Innovation isn’t about standing back and admiring what you’ve delivered in the past, it’s about constantly listening to what your customers want and coming up with killer ideas so you can deliver that competitive edge to your business and your customers business.
Add comment April 20, 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
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
Caveat Emptor
BTM solutions needs to be built as such from day one. Taking several single-platform monitoring tools and integrating them together will not achieve the same result as developing a multi-tier transaction monitoring solution from the ground up.
Continue Reading 1 comment October 30, 2009
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
Does change management impact your infrastructure or your business?
I’ve witnessed a lot in IT over the last decade. I’ve seen a DBA blow away (rm -rf) a live production database thinking they were logged into a test server shell by mistake. I’ve seen websites go bang several hours before and even several minutes into major product launches. I’ve filled out many change requests in my time with many of these processed by people who actually forgot to make the relevant changes despite signing off the change requests as completed. I’ve also seen many customers deploying applications into production based on configuration they used in test environments with debug logging enabled. The best one recently was when a security guard accidently locked themselves in a data center room and hit a button thinking it was the door release when in actual fact it was the EPS power button which knocked out the entire power to the data center. We can blame the rise of the machines for our IT woes but the biggest liability by far is still us human beings 
Today, the only thing constant throughout the application lifecycle is change. Building an application is relatively cheap, supporting and maintaining it is where the costs start to spiral out of control. Change requests are an expensive activity, they require development, regression testing, documentation, planning, downtime, backup procedures and an eye for detail. However, when a change occurs how many organisations can truly quantify the business impact?
What exactly changed?
For example, a DBA might look at the top 5 slowest SQL Statements that execute in the database. They might optimise these in several ways by creating a few indexes, updating relevant table statistics or tweaking I/O settings. Various change requests are then submitted which are then deployed in production. What the DBA doesn’t understand at the time is what impact their changes will have on the business. Their database could be serving multiple applications spanning hundreds of business transactions with thousands of users. Introducing a new index on one table might improve one SQL statement but it could have a detrimental effect on several other SQL statements which collectively could impact several key business transactions. It’s therefore virtually impossible to quantify whether changes like this will have a positive impact on the business.
Same goes for an application developer. I know because I’ve been there and tried to optimise many JVM’s with APM tools in the past. I could spend all day knocking milliseconds off Java API calls or playing with container settings like connection pools or thread counts in a vain attempt to optimise the application sitting on top of the JVM’s. You can find 101 interesting things a day to optimise with an APM tool. The trick is knowing which things will actually impact the business in the most positive way. Its also good to know when to stop tuning – the more you change the more you need to test. When your tweaking application code or changing container settings its not that easy to figure out what business transactions your playing with. Again, you might be tuning your JVM’s to make them more efficient but being able to truly understand the business impact of your actions is still a black art. If a dev team of 5 people spends 4 weeks tuning application code and only improves business transaction response time by 5% did they really do a great job? Did the 5% improvement impact important business transactions or did it impact less important business transactions?
Another problem is knowing when to schedule a change request. Many applications these days are 24/7 and global. No longer can organisations rely on midnight change requests. You want to schedule change requests at times with the least business impact. How many users are logged on at this time? How many business transactions execute at this time? Are the business transactions important or can they suffer unavailability?
Business Transaction Management solves a lot of these change management issues. When you capture all business transactions across all tiers all of the time you have full visibility into how each change request or tier impacts your business transactions and ultimately your business. You can also identify the best time to schedule changes based on business transaction activity. When Change Request #5463 was deployed it improved the SLA for several key business transactions by more than 25%. When Change Request #7653 was deployed it improved the response time of Execute Order by 80% but actually degraded the response time of Cancel Order and Check Customer by almost 350%. This is just a small sample of the benefits BTM can bring to change management.
1 comment August 13, 2009
Lindsay Diamond
Assaf Amit
Andy Wetzel
Stephen Burton
Russell Rothstein
Motti Tal
Marie-Pierre Belanger
cpennoptier
Linh C. Ho
