Posts tagged ‘APM’
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 October 30, 2009 at 8:30 am Assaf Amit 1 comment
What’s Clear About Net Neutrality
By Russell Rothstein
October 12, 2009
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.
October 12, 2009 at 8:57 am Russell Rothstein Leave a comment
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.
Why BTM Complements APM Solutions
Something that has become clear in my mind over the last year is that Business Transaction Management (BTM) is very different to the popular Application Performance Management (APM) solutions we’ve typically seen in the market place over the last 5 years. I base my opinion solely on an important group of people we’ve come to know over the years as “customers”.
My father once taught me an important lesson whilst he was arguing with a waiter in a restaurant, something along the lines of “The customer is always right”. In fact, it was only recently I used the exact same phrase whilst interacting with the security staff at EL AL airport check-in. After a few puzzled looks, baggage checks, several questions and two stickers I was on my way. Anyway, my point is that customers are generally a good indication as to whether something is good, bad, useful, different or valuable.
In the last year I’ve sat with several Fortune 500 customers who have ALL told me that BTM is changing the way they utilise their APM investments. In fact, two of these customers actually shared with me their IT service delivery and support processes so I could see with my own eyes where BTM and APM were playing a key role towards the common objectives of improving end user service levels, performance and availability. Simply put, BTM was used to identify, alert, prioritise (understand business impact) and isolate issues whereas APM was then used to understand root cause and resolution of these issues.
For example, in real-time BTM could detect a user specific transaction that breached in the application, it could then provide an immediate latency breakdown across all tiers where that problematic transaction traversed. Once the latency is isolated to a specific tier the customer can then focus their APM solutions to that tier and understand the root cause and apply a fix. The net result of all of this is that Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) or Recovery (take your pick) is significantly reduced. One BTM customer dropped MTTR from 2 hours to under 15 minutes using both BTM and APM effectively together.
User’s experience transactions, its therefore important that BTM provides you with visibility of every transaction from every user across every tier so you can focus your APM solutions in seconds to the tiers that are causing issues. When your application spans tens or hundreds of tiers you need to isolate the right haystack before you start looking for that needle.
OpTier
Assaf Amit
Andy Wetzel
Russell Rothstein
Motti Tal
Linh C. Ho
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