Wednesday, 15 August 2012

Trend 4 - Virtualized applications. Be paranoid, be smart, be lazy

As I mentioned on Monday to manage these crazy, dynamic and complex applications you’re going to have to be paranoid, be smart and be lazy.

Here’s what I mean by that.
Be Paranoid = Watch Every Transaction from Every User

It’s important that we know.
If at 10.25 in the morning the end user reports that an application is running slow wouldn’t it be great to go back over our information for that time and then be able to drill down from there? Does this mean that you should be actively looking at every transaction every minute of every day? Absolutely not, have an automated tool record the data for you so that you can access that information when there’s a problem or be alerted of a threshold breach in advance and ward off problems.
Be Smart

We want to look across space ie: geographical locations, server to server, maybe the problems are only happening at one location and if so, why? Is there one location that has historically had more problems than others?

It’s also important to look across time, are there times in the day when certain types of transactions are happening that are causing performance issues? Are there times of the day when we are exceeding service levels?



Be lazy
By being lazy we want to try and automate this process as much as possible.

It’s impossible to sit and look at every transaction real time in a command centre or war room. We need to have service level agreements (SLA’s) in place and those SLA’s need to be as detailed as possible. They can be end to end SLA’s or they can be SLA’s for time spent on a database server, time spent at a middleware server or even time spent at a particular segment of the network. Set up a message to receive an SMS when there is a problem, something like SharePath can do this for you.

You can catch my fifth and final trend on Friday
 
Rich Fronheiser
VP, Strategic Marketing

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