2010 Prediction: Vic Nyman, BlueStripe
Cross-Platform Application Management Becomes Critical in 2010
Performance assurance for business-critical applications running across virtualized, dynamic, and distributed infrastructures is a demanding and growing concern for large enterprises
With the continued expansion of virtualized environments, the growing use of cloud infrastructures, and continuing acceptance of newer application architectures, such as Web 2.0 and distributed service-oriented architecture (SOA), the interdependencies inherent in today’s multi-tier applications create exponentially more points of application failures that will continue to impact IT management throughout 2010.
IT Directors and data center managers are being held to service level agreements (SLAs) that require critical applications to deliver services at high levels for the business. They must be available and perform well to meet these SLAs, yet, many IT teams are hampered with their existing management tools that focus on non-application specific measurements, such as memory and CPU utilization, or end-user response times, versus measuring the real service levels of the application for each component in the application system.
Enterprise applications today cross platforms and environments, spanning tiers that exist in both physical and virtual realms, with a variety of operating systems, platforms, and supporting infrastructures. The lack of complete visibility into this cross-platform, multi-technology environment is emerging as a major problem hindering enterprises form supporting and optimizing critical application performance. Our customers have implemented a seemingly infinite combination of technology pieces that contribute to, and support, a single production application: Web servers and App Servers (from multiple vendors) running windows apps, accessing multiple SQL servers on Linux Servers; and on the back-end, anything from legacy mainframe applications to third-party SaaS applications running on the cloud. This limitless number of possibilities has created a situation where IT organizations have difficulty knowing what makes up any specific application.
IT Operations and Application Support teams require a new level of application insight across their entire application structure. To understand true application performance, they need to see the performance of all interactions between all application components. Only when they see the performance at the transaction layer between technology tiers can they fully understand how applications are performing and where performance degrades. Based on experience with our clients, a common struggle we’ve seen at many organizations is the struggle to quickly and conclusively determine the actual cause of poor application performance – whether an issue is related to the network, storage hardware, VMs, servers, application code, or some combination thereof.
