* Maintaining insight and diagnostic control of your apps
Do you have enough insight into your outsourced applications? Many times outsourcing arrangements cover the systems and network management aspects of a particular service, but application management and support is kept in-house. Other times application management is part of the outsourced relationship, but the client company still has a need to monitor application health or have insight into specific business transaction performance. How do you get the best of both worlds – have an outsourcer handle the hardware, network and other system and even application management functions and yet maintain insight and diagnostic control over the goings on inside your application?
Many of the available application management tools provide basic transaction performance data, but this data has more to do with the level of application management and that is the responsibility of the outsourcer. To really understand the health of your application, you need to look inside the transactions in real-time. One recent addition to the application management market is Certagon. With Certagon’s content-based platform you can:
* Derive enterprise-specific key performance indicators (KPIs based on message content).
* Monitor and continuously examine messages in KPI context.
* Auto-discover application inter-relationships and auto-baseline normal interactions in context.
* Perform real-time comparisons to baseline data.
* Alert on deviation – showing the application at fault including transaction type, customer, product, etc.
By looking at both the header and specific transaction payload data, Certagon can auto-discover baseline-specific business data at the transaction level in real-time. This can provide significant early warning to a mounting problem, provide highly granular data to focus problem resolution efforts, and even identify problems too minor to be detected using thresholds set for system wide sensitivity. Potentially serious problems for a specific host or customer type might be overlooked using traditional monitoring. And Certagon is relatively non-intrusive. It only needs a small collector application in a central node location to capture transaction information – not too intrusive for most outsourcing relationships.
So how will your outsourcer feel about you having additional insight into your applications? You could certainly make it a requirement of a new relationship and make it part of the negotiations at the time you establish the outsourcing contract. You should also have no problem requesting this kind of change from your current outsourcing relationship. A tool like Certagon requires only a small collector application to run on a central node within your application environment, so it is not a significantly intrusive monitoring application. And having more insight into your applications may mean that you will assist your outsourcer in maintaining higher availability resulting in fewer service-level agreement credits.
You will have a wealth of transaction data revealing specific performance and even business level data that will allow you to identify and correct minor problems before they become major problems resulting in downtime. This is a net positive gain for your outsourcer and they should be happy to add such a view for you into the mix.
The benefits to you for monitoring transactions at this level can be significant in both customer satisfaction and revenue. Certagon customers have reported identifying problem transactions with certain hosts that had previously gone un-noticed. These transactions represented significant revenue loss, providing very quick ROI. Several Certagon customers are using the application in conjunction with outsourced hosting and have found the combination very beneficial.
