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

Business Metric Correlation (13 of 17) Capacity Management, Telling the Story

As mentioned previously it is important to get business information in to the CMIS to enable us to perform some correlations.

As in the example below we have taken business data and taken component data and we can now report on this together to see if there is some kind of correlation.

Business Transactions vs. CPU Utilization

In this example we can see that the number of customer transactions(shown in dark blue) reasonably correlates with the amount of CPU utilization.

Can we make some kind of judgment based on just what we see here? Do we need to perform some further statistical analysis on this data? What is the correlation co-efficiency for our application data against the CPU utilization?

Closer to the value of 1 indicates that there is a very close correlation between the application data and the underlying component data.

What can we do with this information back to the business? An example would be: This graph indicates that there is a very close correlation between the number of customer transactions and the CPU utilization. Therefore, if we plan on increasing the number of customer transactions in the future we are likely to need to do a CPU upgrade to cope with that demand.

On Wednesday I'll be looking at a Modeling scenario.

Charles Johnson

Principal Consultant