Tackling app performance management

It used to take Michael Lubanski up to 30 hours trying to pinpoint the source of poor application performance in Towers Perrin's benefits administration application. Now the process can take less than 30 minutes.

The time-saver, Lubanski says, is software called RealiTea from TeaLeaf Technology that captures application traffic in real time and shines a light on the cause of poor performance - whether an application or a Web server, load balancer, middleware or another piece of the complex environment supporting online applications.

"We used to just pick a place and start digging, but the software gives us the point of view of the application and eliminates the problem of us not seeing the problem," says Lubanski, manager of enterprise monitoring at the human resources consulting and benefits administration firm in Philadelphia.

Lubanski's problem is a common one. A recent study shows that IT managers spend about 30% of their workweek managing applications. The same report also shows that about 30% of application performance problems cannot be identified or resolved within a day. Wily Technology, a maker of application performance management (APM) software, conducted the survey of 360 IT managers, which says the causes of poor performance are varied.

The good news is that a flood of new vendors and products emerged in the past year to tackle application performance problems. Research from APM Advisors, a new market research firm in Portland, Ore., reports more than 100 companies now offer APM hardware and software in nine product categories, which range from software products that collect information to network appliances that speed application traffic.

The company attempts to make sense of the products and how each addresses a different aspect of APM in a recent paper that says enterprise IT managers need to build application-aware infrastructures.

"IT managers can't afford to keep overlaying tools to get a handle on application performance," says Lynn Nye, president and founder of APM Advisors. "Application management has to be part of the infrastructure; it can't be an afterthought or solved with disparate products placed on top of the infrastructure."

Nye says APM products today provide information through passive data collectors and to some degree control with load-balancing and traffic-management software. Resolving application performance degradation involves collecting data from multiple sources, usually through the use of software agents on servers and network probes, and correlating the information to find the common behavior patterns. Yet until recently most APM tools used for performance monitoring, application acceleration and systems management worked independently.

Products such as Packeteer's PacketShaper, which associates IP addresses and conversations to identify and manage flows between resources, now includes compression technology (which speeds application response time and delivery).

The company also developed Secure Sockets Layer acceleration technology, which while now packaged separately, could become part of the Packeteer's flagship products. Companies such as Fineground Networks, NetScaler and Redline Networks also cache and speed application content to improve response time.