- Is the Cisco MARS mission going to abort?
- First iPhone worm spreads Rick Astley wallpaper
- 10 stunning 3D buildings made with Google SketchUp
- Open source software ready for big business
- Four reasons to buy (and one reason to avoid) the Droid
The walls between IT groups are crumbling, and network professionals report that responsibility for optimal application performance is shifting to them.
Distributed IP networks and complex real-time applications have forced a change. Now network managers need to be in the know from the start about application performance, helping developers understand what will work on a network, spotting poorly performing applications before users feel the effects and delivering LAN-like performance over the wide area to remote and branch offices.
"There are two kinds of network people in my mind: the ones that are just out of college and have all their certifications; and those that know the company's network, the applications that run on it and how to marry those two together," says Larry McBrayer, network architect for SaraLee Technology Services in Mason, Ohio. "That's the difference between a contracted resource called in to troubleshoot a specific network issue [and] a corporate employee that knows the net, the business' apps and how they should be working together."
McBrayer says his application performance duties expanded when his organization installed Siebel software and couldn't get it working as desired. He used a combination of network tools from companies such as Network General and NetQoS, as well as application and system management products from BMC Software, CA and SolarWinds to better track down application performance problems. Ultimately it took a lot of tuning and tweaking by the network team to help the application team work out the kinks in the Siebel deployment.
"It's very cumbersome to explain Sniffer traces to an application developer," he says.
The more companies explore service-oriented architectures, deploy VoIP or consolidate data centers to serve up applications from a centralized point to remote offices, the more network professionals are going to be called on to improve application performance, experts say.
"An intelligent or application-aware network places new demands on network managers," says George Hamilton, director of enterprise computing and networking at The Yankee Group. "They now have more responsibility for applications than just determining whether the network is the source of the problem. . . . The nature of enterprise applications is such that network managers must be involved in their performance."
Hamilton says the key difference is between responding to events and alerts - delivered by typical network management software - and tracking performance and its subtle changes in degradation before services fail and customers feel the effects. Network management tools track faults and availability, meaning they will send an alert if a router doesn't respond to a ping, a server misses a pre-defined threshold or network services aren't available.
Until recently, most performance management tools would reside with the owner of the application. For instance, an application developer might use software from Compuware or Mercury Interactive to profile how an application would work on the network, test it in different scenarios and monitor response times on the server in a production environment to see if the expected and actual performance metrics sync up.
Partner Content
Blue Stripe Software
www.bluestripe.com/
Improving Application Performance Troubleshooting
Diagnosing why an application is slow is hard, at times taking days or weeks to isolate and resolve. This paper explains the challenges involved using current management tools, provides a 'wish list' for application management and analysis, and explains the need for an application system-wide approach that monitors entire applications, not components.
Download Whitepaper
Virtual Vigilance: Managing Application Performance in Virtual Environments
This paper highlights the impact of virtualization on application performance. "Managing Application Performance in Virtual Environments" states: "Best-in-Class organizations are predominately taking actions around improving visibility across both physical and virtual systems, assessing the business impact of application performance and understanding interdependencies of applications in virtualized environments."
Download Whitepaper
Application Service Requests: The Missing Link for Pragmatic ITSM
Forrester Research analyst Glenn O'Donnell and BlueStripe co-founder Vic Nyman discuss a breakthrough approach to application problem management. Learn the new approach for ITSM problem management, which provides: Rapid isolation of application slow-downs to specific components for quick problem resolution, 24/7 monitoring for proactive notification of potential issues before end users are impacted and much more.
Register for Webcast
Comments (1)
RE: Network managers getting apps savvyBy Clyde on September 4, 2007, 5:13 amgood article
Reply | Read entire comment
View all comments