Capturing End-to-End response times of business transactions

Those of you who have been doing Capacity Management for a while will read through this post and nod and understand.  Remember those days when people would call you and say that an application was "slow" and the first thing you'd do is verify that there was enough hardware capacity to handle the existing load?  CPU utilization not too high?  Check.  I/O rates reasonable? Check.  Enough memory?  Check.

When I was just starting out as a capacity planner sometime last century, one of the missing key pieces of information we always wished we had was the end-to-end response time of business transactions.  Sure, we could always eliminate pieces of the infrastructure as potential capacity bottlenecks, but it was always with the wish that we could easily see how much time is being spent within transactions and where that time is actually being spent.  Something that told us where to focus; where to look next.

Efforts were made over the years in making ARM (application response measurement) more mainstream.  ARM is an attempt to insert lines of code into applications that would capture statistics about the response time.  While there's still an ARM working group within the Computer Measurement Group (CMG), ARM has never taken off in a widespread manner.  My theory has always been that people that are writing applications have no desire to add code to write response time data into log files for performance and capacity geeks like me.  The cynical side of me always wondered if commercial software houses really wanted the organizations they sold to to really know how poorly the application performs in the real world.

A relatively new technology (relatively is one of those words that means different things to different people -- some of the mainframe people I know think anything done since 1980 is pretty new) allows organizations to capture this type of data without having to alter code within applications.  Application response monitoring (APM) software allows organizations to look at how well transactions perform, where bottlenecks are, and how well service level agreements are being met.

Metron sells an APM tool called SharePath -- it captures end-to-end information on every production transaction that's completed.  To us, that's important.  No synthetic transactions are generated and no sampling of the production transactions take place.

For years we've been users and sellers of athene® -- a leading Capacity Management software solution.  SharePath and athene® are complementary solutions -- athene® does an expert job of looking at the hardware infrastructure and helping to monitor, manage, and predict future needs, while SharePath looks at the transactions and how well they are (or are not) meeting required service levels.  Data from SharePath can be brought into athene®'s Capacity Management Information Store (CMIS) for use within a client's existing reporting structure and to help the Capacity Manager make predictions and key recommendations to management.

On Thursday May 9 we'll have a webinar that looks at Application Performance Monitoring and why we feel it's an important piece of our 360-degree Capacity Management strategy.  You can register here:

http://metron-athene.com/services/training/webinars/index.html

Rich Fronheiser
Chief Marketing Officer