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

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