Trend 1- IT cost and Service Level Agreements

Let’s start by looking at the first trend, IT cost and Service Level Agreements.

IT professionals must now conduct cost value analysis - It’s not feasible today to provide an unlimited amount of hardware or to provide the absolutely best possible service to every one of your clients, services and applications. Now IT professionals must conduct a cost value analysis in order to ensure that they’re providing a service that meets the service level agreement but optimizes the amount of money that they have to spend to achieve this.

Facilities and energy costs will consume more budget - Facility and energy costs have become more expensive and continue to consume a good deal of your budget.

New application environments typically make service level management more challenging - We frequently see application environments now where we’re looking at 30-40 servers to provide a single service. When you’re looking at that many pieces of hardware, all the network segments between them, all the centralized storage and the virtualization that goes on in that environment., looking at individual transactions and trying to determine what is going on, why it isn’t meeting your service level agreement (SLA) and solving the problem so that it does meet your SLA is a very challenging process.

To manage Service Level Agreements:

Be proactive – you want to try to provide services that meet your SLA’s so you have to be proactive. Plan from the beginning going forward, knowing how the workloads are going to change over time.

Go beyond load testing and look at desktop response times - load testing lets you know whether a transaction completes but the key thing to look at is actual production transactions, showing you exactly how long a transaction takes to complete from a user’s desktop.

Keep an eye on your worst transactions – you spend the majority of your time worrying about and looking at about 10% of your environment. Keep an eye on your most challenging and most important transactions and you’ll be more successful at meeting your SLA’s.

My final recommendation here is to:

Keep an eye on your top 10 killers

The top 10 killers in my mind aren’t necessarily those that aren’t performing well, they are the ones that could potentially be killers, those that are absolutely crucial to your business.

So how do you keep an eye on transactions?

Here's a typical report form SharePath, our application transaction software. It allows you to monitor end to end response times and see where time is being spent during a transaction

These are not synthetic transactions these are real user experience production times and they allow you to see each hop of a transaction, from server to server, network to network so it’s easy to identify exactly where your transactions are falling down.

You can’t monitor every single transaction within your organization as there simply isn’t the time or resource, so choose your top transactions, the ones that matter and monitor those.

Trend 2 on Wednesday

Rich Fronheiser

VP, Strategic Marketing