Why do you need to monitor Business/Application Transaction data?

A good Application Performance Management(APM) tool will give you a LOT of useful information about the workload in your environment. It’ll also present the data in a way that allows various teams to talk in the same language.  

So it will help define what a user transaction is, and where that transaction spends it’s time.

A user action = A transaction

–     Log on, Search, Add to Basket, Checkout, Payment = 5 transactions

So what are the benefits, difficulties and issues to avoid when using APM? 

Benefits

–     Common language

–     Service based

–     Defined SLAs

–     Real workload volumes (Planning benefits)

Usual Difficulties

–     No tool capturing this data (see my recommendation at the end of this blog)

–     No access to the data held (Typically controlled by Operations)

–     No import facility to capacity tool

Avoid

–     Exporting data from both tools into Excel and manually cutting and pasting to get combined reports

This is data that is traditionally hard to get hold of.  Either it’s simply not collected, or it’s fragmented and hidden by teams who don’t want to lose control of “their toy”.  And quite often it’s not been designed with the intention of combining its data with something else, like a capacity tool.

If you get or have an APM tool running the last thing you want to do is spend time exporting everything into excel to combine the data.  (88% of spread sheets have errors). 

My recommendation, if you haven't got an APM tool currently, is to take a look at SharePath - it monitors in real time and provides you with the real user experience(not synthetic) 

http://www.metron-athene.com/products/sharepath/index.html

Also don't forget to register for Dale's 'Performance Management made easy webinar, which examines the problems solved by application performance management (APM) tools, shows how efforts to monitor and troubleshoot complex applications without good visibility can be very tedious and time consuming, and describes different methods that APM tools use to obtain data and compares and contrasts the different approaches.

http://www.metron-athene.com/services/webinars/capacity-management-webinars.html

Phil Bell

Consultant

Performance Management made easy

Monitoring physical IT infrastructure components such as disks, CPU, network, and databases provides important information about system utilization.
Creating and monitoring synthetic transactions for partial views of the user experience and validating application availability provide useful information about what users may be experiencing. However, neither of these provide the actual experience users have when using real applications.

Application Performance and Real User Experience is the new generation of monitoring that provides information about exactly what is happening with user response.

I'll be running a webinar on January 18 which examines the problem solved by application performance management (APM) tools, shows how efforts to monitor and troubleshoot complex applications without good visibility can be very tedious and time consuming, and describes different methods that APM tools use to obtain data, comparing and contrasting the different approaches.

Modern application transactions can start on a smart phone or virtual desktop web browser and span many diverse infrastructure resources before returning results to the users. Knowing how much time is taken across all of these elements is crucial for quickly identifying performance problems.

In my webinar I'll examine:

• Modern application architecture
• The problem solved by APM
• Solving performance problems without APM
• Users, applications and transactions
• Different approaches to APM

I'll be sharing some examples with you too.

Registration for this event is now open, so don't forget to book your place.

http://www.metron-athene.com/services/webinars/capacity-management-webinars.html

Dale Feiste

Principal Consultant

Management Overview Applications (8 of 17) Capacity Management, Telling the Story

Let’s move on to what we will see at the management level, particularly for applications. This is called an application summary.

The example summary below shows grouping by category, in this instance by location.

We have a call center, a warehouse, datamart and sales and it shows you that horizontal scale progress through use of color. For each arrival workflow that we have coming in it shows you the progress.

Application Summary

As you can see there are some reds being displayed in this report, the comment section clearly describes what these issues are.

This allows you to clearly display to management the issues, what is causing them and enables you to discuss with them what you are doing about it.

In this case, the warehouse needs some new architecture.

On Friday I'll be discussing resources and costs, in the meantime sign up to our Community and get access to our resources - white papers, Techtips and on-demand webinars.http://www.metron-athene.com/_resources

Charles Johnson

Principal Consultant

Types of Data required (6 of 17) Capacity Management, Telling the Story

Today we'll be looking at the types of data required.

Technical data – in ITIL terms our data should be coming from business, service and resource levels. This data is then fed in to our CMIS and allows us to see what is happening in two ways: 

•        Current – how everything is performing now

•        History – the more historical data we have on our systems and applications the more accurate our trending and modeling will be.

Business metrics – what is happening in the business will dictate the resources needed to support it. 

•        Current – what is happening now in the business

•        Forecast – what is planned for the future, in terms of growth, new services, increased user numbers etc

Key Performance Indicators – we need some idea of how we can measure our performance going forward.

Threshold levels – we need to know what thresholds we are going to be planning towards to enable us to put them on reports and see when/if they are going to be breached.

Capacity Management

 The diagram below shows 360°Capacity Management. A combination of our capacity management software athene^® and SharePath allows you to bring resource, application, application transaction response times, service, business data and KPI’s to your CMIS. This allows you to build the most accurate picture of your environment as you can.

For more details of athene^® and SharePath visit our website.
http://www.metron-athene.com/products/index.html  

On Monday I'll be running through a selection of the types of presentations that you can use. 

Charles Johnson

Principal Consultant

Capacity Management - What are we trying to tell the business?

Interacting with customers sometimes throws up a question we’re sure we should know the answer to, but ends up being not as simple to answer as we’d expected.  One of those questions that really makes us sit down and ponder how to answer it.

So here’s my question:  As a Capacity Manager, what am I trying to tell the business?

Am I trying to tell them about Utilizations? Headroom? Risk? Costs? Customer Service?

There are so many things I could be telling the business it’s hard to say “This is what I’m providing to the business”.

It struck me that if I can’t provide the answer then maybe I’m trying to answer the wrong question.  Rather than dictate to the business what I can tell them doesn’t it make more sense to be asking them, “What is it that you want to know?”

As part of maturing their Capacity Management processes one of our clients is doing just that. They are successfully engaging with all manner of business units within their organization, showing them the sorts of things they can do and then asking the question.  “What information do you want to have? What is actually going to be helpful/useful to you?”  That might be a single metric on the intranet capacity report, or something with a lot more detail.

There are probably 3 main factors that have come into play in this successful initiative.

1.     The implementation of a Capacity Management tool, athene®, that gives them the ability to easily import and report on the metrics the business units are interested in.  Be that Searches, Transaction Response times, Transaction counts – in fact any time date stamped metrics that they want.  Whatever that part of the business considers to be the most important metric(s) to them.

2.     Integration with a real user monitoring APM tool.  Being able to see exactly what the customers (internal and external), are doing and experiencing.

3.     Having a member of staff on the capacity team who has a business background and the social skills to match.  Someone who can engage with the right people, who knows what they are currently doing to get their stats and who can learn how to integrate them with the platform statistics (CPU, Memory etc).

Bringing these factors together has resulted in heightening the profile of the Capacity Management Team and showing their real value to the business. Business units are now approaching them and asking for data to be included because they want the same advantages they see other departments getting from the data.

So what are we trying to tell the business?  I’m here, and I’ve got some really great stuff I can do to help you.  What is it you want to know?

Don't miss out on our Capacity Management 101 online workshop taking place in June.

http://www.metron-athene.com/services/online-workshops/index.html

Phil Bell

Consultant

360° Capacity Management - an end to end view (7 of 7)

On Monday I described some types of data needed to provide 360° Capacity Management. 

Those included server and mainframe resource data, centralized storage data, and network data – all kept in a historical Capacity Management Information Store (CMIS) that allows for quick retrieval and analysis by the Capacity Manager.  I’ll wrap the series today by mentioning some additional types of data that the capacity manager should have at hand:

Application data is incredibly important – many applications store key information in log files or in some other way so that the Capacity Manager can easily get at this data for yet another view that can help him make reasoned decisions and recommendations. 

Sometimes, application data is processed in a way by a tool that makes the data immediately valuable – an example of this would be the way athene© ES/1 takes mainframe application data, establishes severity levels for the data, and makes key recommendations.  Other application data needs to be brought into the CMIS in another fashion – an example of this would be the way Metron’s flagship product, athene®, uses Integrator Capture Packs to bring key application data into the athene© CMIS.

Facility and data center data is important, as well.  One of the key items typically ignored by companies is the amount of power and other resources used by IT hardware.  Over-configuring the data center may sound like a way to ensure adequate capacity and the meeting of SLAs, but such a mindset can come at a huge cost.

I’d be remiss to not include key business metrics in the set of data needed by the Capacity Manager.  Key business data can include the number of business transactions over a particular time interval, the number of web hits to a server, or even the amount of money spent on things like centralized storage resources. 

Key business drivers can help the capacity manager identify periods of peak demand and can help the capacity manager predict resource requirements moving forward.

Finally, we can’t possibly ignore the end-to-end view and the perspective of the end-user.   I remember a Capacity Management challenge I faced years and years ago.  End-users were not receiving the service they were promised and IT was on the hook and most people in IT spent time pointing fingers at other parts of IT.  The endgame was that we went back to an old version of the application and everyone was happy again – we scrapped the new version entirely.

But why did we do that?  In the end, I’m convinced we did that because we had no way of figuring out which piece of the application was taking so long and it was easier to go back to something that just worked.

Having a mechanism to capture end-to-end response times for every production transaction as well as a mechanism to determine how much time is being spent at each hop in those transactions can be a key way to police service level agreements, troubleshoot existing problems, and help negotiate or renegotiate future SLAs.  Being able to store this data historically for the Capacity Manager to use in the future is important, as well.

360° Capacity Management is Metron’s philosophy for Capacity Management in the era of cloud computing, virtualization, and ever-increasing complexity in the data center.  Feel free to contact me if you would like to talk more about specific solutions or about your organization’s philosophy on Capacity Management.

http://www.metron-athene.com/products/athene/index.html

Rich Fronheiser

Chief Marketing Officer

rich.fronheiser@metron-athene.com