Application management: A work in progress

With multiple point products available, managers must mix and match to find the best approach for their networks.

Cosmetics giant Mary Kay is in the midst of an extreme makeover - one that will overhaul and enhance the company's application performance management strategy.

Steve Moore, technology leader for Mary Kay Information Services and Technology in Dallas, says his organization is evolving its processes and fine-tuning technologies to be able to predict application performance issues, rather than simply react. While acknowledging it might sound clichéd, he says transitioning from a reactive firefighting group to a proactive application management team is an IT priority for the retail sales company.

"We care if a core router goes down, but we also want to be able to predict the other things that will be affected if one does," Moore says. "For us, application nirvana will be becoming more predictive and understanding the behavior of applications directly in relation to our business processes."

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Cosmetics giant Mary Kay is in the midst of an extreme makeover - one that will overhaul and enhance the company's application performance management strategy.

Steve Moore, technology leader for Mary Kay Information Services and Technology in Dallas, says his organization is evolving its processes and fine-tuning technologies to be able to predict application performance issues, rather than simply react. While acknowledging it might sound clichéd, he says transitioning from a reactive firefighting group to a proactive application management team is an IT priority for the retail sales company.

"We care if a core router goes down, but we also want to be able to predict the other things that will be affected if one does," Moore says. "For us, application nirvana will be becoming more predictive and understanding the behavior of applications directly in relation to our business processes."

Moore is among those enterprise network managers who have been charged with adapting their basic element and device monitoring tools into intelligent application management systems that will dynamically respond to changing end-user and business demands and deliver optimized application performance. Unlike in the past, when availability management tools - which reported up/down status for devices, servers and so on - sufficed, today's IT managers demand more information about potential performance bottlenecks across multiple networks and devices.

"Application management needs to bring together a lot of different data points and perform automated analysis," says Stephen Elliot, a senior analyst with IDC. The market research firm estimates that performance-management software revenue will experience a 7.4% annual growth rate over the next five years, reaching $4.48 billion by 2007. Application management tools aren't new, but in the past year or so, the demand for products grew and vendors began to attack application management from different angles.

Management veterans such as BMC Software, Computer Associates, Compuware, Concord Communications, Mercury Interactive, Micromuse, NetIQ and Smarts each offer multiple products that promise to address application performance management. The software typically measures response time across multiple infrastructure components and provides the option to identify the most likely cause of the problem, after the slowdown has occurred.

Newcomers such as Collation, Entuity, ProactiveNet, Troux Technologies, Vieo and Wily Technology also deliver tools to track response time metrics, potential application code errors and more. New vendors tend to talk more of monitoring all else for the sake of the application, and integrate with network management tools such as HP OpenView to bring those network fault and events into the analysis of application performance.

WAN optimization companies such as Expand Networks, NetScaler, Packeteer and Peribit Networks address application performance with their high-availability gear that speeds packets across WANs. While their focus is on the wide area, traffic monitoring tools also can watch application traffic on the LAN for performance issues.

CA, for example, acquired technology from SilentRunner in 2003 to add traffic monitoring and packet analysis capabilities to its Unicenter management software line. BMC recently partnered with Packeteer to add the latter vendor's network traffic management technology to BMC's application and systems management tools.

Industry heavyweights IBM and HP, which have been stumping for their respective utility computing product road maps, offer management software and services to help customers tackle application management. These vendors recognize that intelligent and dynamic application management is a critical component of their ultimate goal of automating data center operations, provisioning and resource allocation.

"The application performance management market is fierce; every vendor wants a piece of it," says Jasmine Noel, principal at Ptak, Noel & Associates.

Despite the many ways to manage applications - or perhaps because of the multiple approaches - achieving an affordable and maintainable application management system continues to pose a challenge to enterprise network managers.

"Network managers are being inundated with events set on 40 different thresholds," Elliot says. "They need correlation diagnostics, a tool that says all these events mean there could be an application performance problem at this time in this environment."Monitoring application behavior is difficult for IT managers and vendors alike because applications typically don't take the same route to fulfill each end-user request. For example, an online ordering system would send the Web site customer's request for more information through a router to a Web server, which then needs to pull data from either a database or storage device. Once the information is gathered, the delivery could take a different route back to the end user.

Because these tools need to capture the data at each step, it becomes difficult for IT managers and vendor products to understand, control and then predict performance problems. Typically, capturing data at multiple points requires agents on managed systems, a time-consuming (and costly if considering product upgrades) process. "Right now for application management, network managers are defining one key service and starting there," IDC's Elliot says.