Download the 2009 Handbook of Application Delivery - A Network Professional's Guide to Ensuring Application Delivery by Dr. Jim Metzler, Industry Analyst with Ashton, Metzler & Associates
Impact of Application Performance on Business Capabilities
Aberdeen Group’s Research Benchmark on
Application Performance indicates that issues with application performance are impacting overall business revenues by up to 9%. 58% of the organizations surveyed are not satisfied with performance of business critical applications.
This impact is not only related to customer facing web applications, but also to issues with applications that are being used by customer-facing employees such as CRM or ERP. Performance of these applications is impacting the effectiveness of these employees to work prospect and customers to generate revenue.
Optimizing Application Delivery and Proactive Identification of Issues
Optimization of application delivery includes solving performance problems quickly, being proactive to identify issues before impacting the users and business and knowing when to expand the infrastructure to support increased demand and usage. To proactively manage and support the delivery of business services, the infrastructure team must monitor mission critical applications running across the distributed enterprise, understanding the normal behavior, be aware of pending alerts, and foresee impacted users and servers.
What is Best-in-Class in Business Services Delivery?
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An example of the Application Performance Appliance deployed with Visual Performance Manager. |
Aberdeen Group Benchmark distinguishes Best-in-Class companies in:
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Improvement in application availability
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Improvement in application response time
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Success rate in preventing issues with application performance before end users are impacted
Best-in-class organizations reported:
- 106% average improvement in application availability
- 11.4 times average improvement in response times for business critical applications
- 85% improved success rate in preventing issues with application performance before end users are impacted
Visual Performance Manager
Manage Application Performance with Actionable Visibility
Visual Performance Manager provides the performance information to optimize the delivery of application services whether you are deploying new applications or optimizing application delivery. Designed with ease-of-use in mind, the user can quickly scan the health of critical business applications, problematic remote sites and servers, and isolate the root cause of performance issues. The application performance management solution in Visual Performance Manager includes the application performance appliance and software on the Visual Performance Manager Server.
Application Performance Appliance
The application performance appliance is a proprietary hardware/software component that feeds application performance data to the Visual Performance Manager server. The application performance appliance is a passive device that is deployed in the data centers where the server farms reside. It collects data via tap or span port of the switches which interconnect Web servers, application servers, database servers, streaming media servers, and DNS/DHCP servers. Through this connection, the application performance appliance is privy to all client traffic to the Web servers, requests to the application servers, and subsequent queries to the database servers – no software agents are required at remote client-side
Visual Performance Manager – Optimizing Networked-Application Delivery
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Alarms can be sorted by application, site and severity. Alarm life cycle tracks the duration and changes in severity of each alarm. (Click to view larger image) |
To ensure continuous delivery of critical business services, Visual Performance Manager application performance solution provides enterprise views of critical applications so that you can proactively focus on problematic application, site or server before impacting user productivity. Baselines are generated for end user response time by application, site and server connect time. When deviations occur, alarms are generated to notify the user.
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At a glance actionable visibility – Summarizes end-user response time of mission critical applications, slowest sites and servers. (click to view larger image) |
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With 1 minute granularity information, displaying end user response time with application, network and server components,the infrastructure team can quickly pinpoint the problem domain eliminating finger-pointing between the groups.(click to view larger image) |
Identifying Root Cause Of Performance Problems
One of the challenges of segmenting a performance problem is to determine the problem domain early on in the troubleshooting process – application, server or network. If it is the network, be able to characterize the traffic and determine impact on the users. Multi-tier application presents unique challenges since traditional analyzers cannot show the relationship of the application traffic between the tiers in a meaningful way for problem identification.
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Having enterprise network performance visibility integral to Visual Performance Manager is critical to managing application performance whether utilizing NetFlow data or dedicated hardware collectors. (click to view larger image) |
Maintain Business Capabilities by Ensuring User Productivity When a user complains about a slow application, it is simple to determine the sources of the problem.
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Simply type in the IP address to investigate a single client application performance issue. View end user response time, transaction volume and individual client response time compared to the site. (click to view larger image) |
See exactly what the user is doing with an application. Advanced filters support site, server, application, client selections with custom request/response types within any timeframe. Instead of packets, transactions are shown to facilitate rapid problem identification. (click to view larger image) |
Managing Business Critical Multi-tier Applications
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Multi-tier applications are complex and performance problems are difficult to pinpoint. The challenge is where to collect data, how to view the information in context with each tier of the application. |
Minimize business impact by reducing mean time to identify and solve performance problems and improve IT resource utilization by providing performance information in an easy to understand format for team members from multiple disciplines.
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Visual Performance Manager simplifies multi-tier application troubleshooting by providing time-correlated views of back-end transactions. (click to view larger image) |
Demonstrating Business Service Delivery Reporting on application service level agreement and demonstrating business service delivery is part of the expectation from the Line of Business and IT executives.
Visual Performance Manager includes a suite of performance reports in Application Performance and helps to deliver business value by proactively managing the performance of critical applications to avoid disrupted productivity and unnecessary infrastructure expenses.
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The suite of application performance reports includes categories of usage trends, application transactions, and wide area network application traffic. (click to view larger image) |
Customize Views of the Application Services
Visual Performance Manager supports customized views, whether it is the network engineer, operations or IT director, the information on the screen can be customized to the individual’s role.
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Fully customizable Mydashboard creates focus on the most important aspects of application and network services. (click to view larger image) |
Visual Performance Manager Visual Performance Manager application performance solution provides unprecedented visibility of networked-applications. The solution can quickly pinpoint problem domain – network, server, application, provides client based performance analysis and visibility into multitier applications. These are critical capabilities for managing the availability and performance of networked-applications supporting mission-critical business services. Visual Performance Manager provides best in class application performance management.
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Visual Performance Managers architecture allows integration of multiple data sources. |