Performance Management: Making Sense of a Sea of Vendors

We recently compiled a list of all the application performance management vendors we could think of and came up with more than 50. That is way too many for folks to easily ferret out which ones are right for a job at hand—so we set out to find a straightforward way to categorize vendor solutions. Our answer: to categorize performance management tools by what they look at and when they look at it. Here's what we mean.

What is the view? Application delivery performance management solutions focus on one of two views—either they look at infrastructure (which we call "columns"), or they look at application flows (which we call "rows"). As we explained in a previous blog, both views are important but they are very different.

What is the timing of the view? Within the two technical views, vendor tools apply either to applications when they are in development (pre-production), or when they are up and running in an operational environment (production). We then cut the "what" and "when" attributes together to create a handy two-by-two categorization matrix that looks like this.

Tools with an infrastructure focus manage sub-systems. They are silo oriented, and provide vertical views through the system. Such a view might be that server X is 99% available. Application-focused tools, in contrast, are designed to manage traffic—i.e. application flows. Flows are horizontal cuts through the system providing information like: application Y is 97% user accessible.

Tools focused on development environments perform quality assurance and load testing functions to provide information such as: server Z can handle 1,000 users. On the other hand, operations-focused tools manage such things as server capacity to provide information like: we will need to add a new server next month.

For a balanced perspective you need tools that support all four of the quadrants. Today that often means buying tools from multiple vendors, although a few supply products in more than one quadrant. Do you try to balance your investments in each of the four quadrants? Do you have a strategy to achieve a balanced view of performance? If not, you should.

In the coming months, we will profile vendor offerings in the upper two quadrants of the matrix—i.e., vendors with tools that manage application flows in development as well as in the operational environments. As part of each profile, we will ask customers to comment on their experiences using the tool.

• Network Management
• Application Performance Management