Tracking application performance virtually everywhere

IT managers that find application performance management challenging now should prepare themselves to face the nearly impossible task of tracking application hops and traffic flows into virtual computing environments. That is, if they aren’t equipped with one of the various tools emerging now to follow applications into the virtual world.

No pain, no gain when it comes to managing virtualization
Virtualization continues to pose management challenges
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“Virtualization poses a new series of problems for application performance management, as the use of a hypervisor makes the application within the container relatively opaque in terms of performance data collection,” reads an October 2008 Forrester Research report. “As a consequence, most enterprises seem to have taken a very cautious attitude toward ‘virtualizing’ their critical applications.”

Traditional application management technologies would associate performance with server response times, typically the server hosting the application. Virtualization changes the dynamic by enabling applications to be hosted on multiple servers, and in the case of VMware’s VMotion, servers can be moved without management software necessarily being able to follow application traffic as it hops from virtual machine to virtual machine.

Companies such as BlueStripe Software, Netuitive and Network Instruments tout features that enable their management software products to report on application performance as traffic crosses from physical servers to virtual machines. This week NetScout joined the ranks with these and other vendors that incorporated VMware technology support into their software.

“As enterprises continue to drive datacenter and server consolidation initiatives and increasingly leverage virtualization technologies, all the challenges associated with optimizing, protecting and troubleshooting applications apply to virtualized networks, but with exponentially more complexity and urgency”, said Steven Shalita, vice president of marketing, NetScout. “The agent has been optimized to work with virtual environments.”

The nGenius Virtual Agent is available for VMware ESX and ESX1 environments at no additional cost in controlled release now. The agent consumes a license port within the nGenius Performance Manager platform resulting in an effective cost of $1,000 per deployed agent. The nGenius Virtual Agent will be generally available within the next three week at which time customers can download the software from NetScout’s Web site.

Interested in freeware and shareware, open source applications and scaled down versions of commercial software and services? In the coming weeks, Network World will devote an online forum to the topic of free techie stuff, which I will compile and present for your review and potential download. Let me know what you find, what you want to hear more about and what invaluable tools that didn’t cost you a thing at ddubie@nww.com.

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Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.