The many faces of application management

Modern application management comes in many forms

Industry analysis by Beth Schultz, plus the latest news headlines.

An application should do what it is supposed to, when it is needed, within a reasonable amount of time, and with no trouble. Getting applications to behave that way is the goal of application management. There are many kinds of tools available to help achieve that goal; here’s a sampling.

Some monitor and manage the performance of an application from an infrastructure perspective. They use synthetic transactions or real-time transaction-monitoring techniques to do that. These tools can take many forms; for example, some are agent-based and sit on servers to monitor the performance of an application in a time series, while others require application instrumentation. Included in this group are the application performance products that monitor and manage composite applications as they span the IT infrastructure. Tivoli’s ITCAM (a combination of its acquired Candle PathWAI and Cyanea tools and Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance) and HP’s OpenView Transaction Analyzer are examples.

There are also application management tools that monitor Web sites from external points, to test the availability and general responsiveness of applications. Keynote and Mercury Interactive are examples.

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An application should do what it is supposed to, when it is needed, within a reasonable amount of time, and with no trouble. Getting applications to behave that way is the goal of application management. There are many kinds of tools available to help achieve that goal; here’s a sampling.

Some monitor and manage the performance of an application from an infrastructure perspective. They use synthetic transactions or real-time transaction-monitoring techniques to do that. These tools can take many forms; for example, some are agent-based and sit on servers to monitor the performance of an application in a time series, while others require application instrumentation. Included in this group are the application performance products that monitor and manage composite applications as they span the IT infrastructure. Tivoli’s ITCAM (a combination of its acquired Candle PathWAI and Cyanea tools and Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance) and HP’s OpenView Transaction Analyzer are examples.

There are also application management tools that monitor Web sites from external points, to test the availability and general responsiveness of applications. Keynote and Mercury Interactive are examples.

Application load testers are another kind of application management tool. They place differing transactions loads on an application to see if it can handle the loads anticipated in production.

There are also management tools that look at Web user experience and Web site integrity. Some monitor and record the steps that a user takes on a Web site, so if users start to abandon their transactions mid-stream, application developers could “play back” the actual user sessions to find that an application error arises at the point where users abandon the Web application. Tealeaf is an example.

Another variation is Web site availability services, such as Alertsite, that can notify you when your site is down.

Web services and service-oriented architectures are emerging application technologies that represent another challenge. There are tools that are specifically designed to manage them, tools from vendors such as Infravio, Amberpoint and Actional.

Other management vendors map application relationships. Some of these have evolved from other areas, such as configuration management. Examples are Collation, Relicore and Motive.

There are vendors that help to isolate application code problems in a production environment. An example is Identify Software.

Then there are the application-specific management tools designed to manage a particular off-the-shelf application, such as Microsoft Exchange, Siebel, or ERP applications. These are provided by a variety of vendors such as NetIQ, Tivoli and Microsoft.

Add to the mix those tools that are designed to provision systems for applications. This includes IBM’s Dynamic Infrastructure for mySAP Business Suite and BladeLogic.

There are other kinds of application management tools. Some address specific types of applications, while others address specific perspectives of applications, such as performance or availability. The choices seem almost endless.

Read more about infrastructure management in Network World's Infrastructure Management section.

Schultz is a longtime IT journalist. You can email her or find her here.