* Network World Buyer's Guide provides avenue for exploring app monitoring options
During an analyst roundtable discussion at last week’s Network World’s IT Roadmap conference in Boston, Jim Metzler, president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates, said that while IT folks have a pretty good handle on general network management tasks, they, as a rule, fall down on end-to-end application monitoring and management.
During an analyst roundtable discussion at last week’s Network World’s IT Roadmap conference in Boston, Jim Metzler, president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates, said that while IT folks have a pretty good handle on general network management tasks, they, as a rule, fall down on end-to-end application monitoring and management.
“Fault management for routers? We don’t worry about that kind of stuff too much anymore,” said Metzler. But we’re not good at management that transcends resources, he said.
“Application service delivery, where you have to take into account the health of everything between the client and the application, we stink at managing that.”
In a recent white paper Metzler authored called, “The Application Delivery Handbook,” one of the conclusions he drew from his interviews with more than a dozen IT professions with titles ranging from IT Manager to CIO, was that in most cases where the performance of key business application is eroding, it’s the end users, and not the IT organization that notices first.
Metzler then goes on in that paper to advocate a tiered approach to application service delivery that combines first developing applications for faster delivery; then employing a variety of infrastructure components – such as WAN optimization wares – geared specifically at cutting the time it takes for application streams to traverse the wires; and, finally using monitoring tools that can track applications’ progress so that IT knows that things are going south before end users notice.
In the Network World’s Application Performance Monitoring Buyer’s Guide, we’ve amassed detailed information on over a dozen products that hone in on end-to-end application performance levels by closely watching businesses, messaging and Web application servers; keeping tabs on the network infrastructure so that IT meets service-level agreements; and producing application and service availability reports directly to the IT team. Tune into this Buyer’s Guide and see which products can help you keep your line of business applications up and running 24/7.
