Making application performance a non-issue

Understand, then control Options aplenty Attacking app performance management

Applications at Best Buy Canada/Future Shop can be so complicated that analyzing performance takes no fewer than eight monitoring tools. Jason Kennedy, a systems management analyst at the electronics retailer's headquarters in Burnaby, B.C., says he needs such a large tool set to ensure the core features of point-of-sale, inventory and other business-critical applications are working efficiently across 130 locations. Kennedy says he hopes to ease his management burden by using HP's OpenView Operations application performance management software, although he has no illusions about that tool belt getting any lighter. "I don't think there could be just one tool for application performance management," Kennedy says. "If someone did manage to build that tool, it would be so complex, it would be impossible to use."

In Best Buy's case, OpenView Operations will provide a collection and correlation point for data gathered by other OpenView products, a Computer Associates' workflow management product and SNMP traps built into the company's homegrown applications, among other third-party monitoring tools. "If I can efficiently get to one pane of glass by bringing that data together, I can get closer to seeing the performance of the entire service connected to an application," Kennedy says.

Understand, then control

Kennedy is tackling one of the more challenging management tasks in networking today: understanding application behavior enough to control it. This isn't a new issue, by any means. But it is one growing in importance as companies continuously intertwine their business processes with those of customers and suppliers.

Users need strong application performance management capabilities to diagnose trouble quickly and eliminate finger-pointing among business partners. This has shifted demand from tools that monitor distinct network components to software that can measure the end-user experience, diagnosis the source of performance degradations, and understand and visually map the relationships between applications and the network components that supports them.

"Business managers only care if their apps or services are working, not about servers or network devices," says Jasmine Noel, principal with JNoel Associates.

At Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Brian Jones, manager of network engineering and operations, employs homegrown tools alongside Smarts' InCharge Service Assurance Manager software. He integrates network and availability data with SNMP traps and other information that might be pertinent to application performance. But as the importance of application management grows at Virginia Tech, Jones says his team will evaluate more commercial options that are open enough to integrate with the tools he uses today. "Streaming video, [voice over IP] and other [quality-of-service] demands make it more necessary than ever to be able to quickly diagnose and resolve issues. We are looking into systems that could serve as one correlation point," he says.