* Altaworks aids Application Quality Management
Whenever something bad happens, most users blame the network. It is easy to point the finger at the network, and doing so instantly puts the network people on the defensive. It is also remarkably hard to figure out whether the network is really to blame.
Aside from the visceral glee non-network types get from watching NOC personnel bounce off the walls, those who blame everything on the network overlook a significant fact: Much bad application performance is due to applications that have not been optimized to run on a production network. When an application is built in a protected and dedicated development environment, it is often impossible to predict just how that application will perform when it is running over a network that may be global in scope.
Developers are not always the problem here. While development usually involves a certain amount of soak and load testing, it can be difficult to get a sense of what the internal dynamics are likely to be for any given application. And with dynamic allocation of resources, it is not always certain that a given application environment won’t change over time.
What is needed is an embedded capability for IT to monitor applications in context. Ideally, this would be a capability that would be implicit from development through deployment, and which would allow the NOC personnel to evaluate the application in action.
Of course, this was precisely the point of the initiatives a few years ago to embed quality-control telemetry into programs. These initiatives failed in most environments mostly because programmers hated building internal telemetry. Additionally, the amount of overhead in putting performance telemetry into code was considerable.
New tools allow developers to build performance instrumentation directly into software that accompanies an application into production. This technology allows developers and test personnel to define allowable limits and specific data views that operations personnel can compare to actual measurements to finally answer the question of whether the network really is the problem.
Altaworks is one company enabling this concept of Application Quality Management. Altaworks’ flagship product, Panorama, provides a very deep insight into the application environment that allows developers to evaluate the performance of their code under production loads and then develop metrics that can accompany the applications into the production environment. Unlike several other similar offerings, Panorama has the virtue of providing abstracted and business-centric user views that allow even fairly non-technical personnel to understand the dynamics of application performance. Since Panorama has a small footprint, software vendors have shipped it as a built-in control panel for their applications.
Panorama customers say it is very easy to use and has simplified the process of stabilizing their applications in production. One customer in particular noted that the impact on IT operations has been extraordinary because Panorama significantly reduces finger-pointing.
Altaworks is one of several vendors in this area, but its product appears to be sufficiently easy to use and noninvasive enough to allow it to gain wide acceptance. IT managers planning the deployment of new networked applications may want to check out such Application Quality Management technology generally and Altaworks in particular.
