Rose Business Technologies

Clarity - Simplicity - Productivity

Ensure Reliable Service Delivery by Linking Infrastructure and Application Performance Management
One way to achieve the goal of reliable service delivery is to effectively identify, locate and resolve the problems affecting critical business applications and expedite an accurate, complete resolution. Linking the activities of the infrastructure management team with those of its colleagues in application performance management is the best strategy. Bringing these traditionally independent domains together improves the performance and availability of services to internal and external IT consumers alike. The unfortunate reality, however, is that most infrastructure and application performance management teams remain isolated in silos and continue to use niche solutions that cannot deliver the inter-department visibility needed to ensure the reliability of critical servicesor a rapid restoration when issues arise. As such, when revenue-generating applications like location based wireless services are not performing as expected, it may take hours or even days to triage the problem, and identify and eliminate the root cause. Failing to uncover a problem in a timely manner can have costly consequences. For example, the cumulative impact of employees waiting for an application to respond quickly translates to lower productivity and significant frustration and loss of confidence in IT.

2011 Rose Business Technologies, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Contact: http://www.rosebt.com/contact.html

Rose Business Technologies

Clarity - Simplicity - Productivity

Since the root cause of these and other problems often hides deeply within the infrastructure or the application itself, creating synergies between infrastructure and application support teams and the various personnel who serve unique purposes within them is the only way to protect the organization. To do so, infrastructure management team leaders need to communicate the value of their departments solutions to their peers in application performance management, and recommend that they adopt a tool that complements and integrates with the solution or solutions their team currently utilizes. This will increase the transparency of infrastructure and application performance management activities and promote a collaborative approach to problem identification that leads to a quick diagnosis and fix before the ill effects are felt across the organization. Achieving the high levels of visibility afforded by integrating disparate tools and, by extension, more closely aligning IT to the business requires that IT: Break down the barriers between teams Integrate the infrastructure and application performance management tools Think business services first

Although many efforts have been made to shift ITs focus to integrated tools, it remains a difficult concept to put into practice because of how traditional enterprise IT management is organized. As individual computing components rose in profile and importance, the response was to create autonomous siloseach with its own set of personnel, responsibilities, processes, language and culturesto manage these unique areas. This narrow focus stressed the importance of tools that addressed the silos needs only, without much consideration for how these tools would interact within the larger environmenta rule to which infrastructure and application performance management are no exception. Yet, effective, proactive communication between the two groups is essential to ensuring the uptime and reliability of key business servicesand, most importantly, to the process of prioritizing activities based on services vital to the success of the organization. As such, it is critical that these teams move away from the silo-centric management approach and technologies that have so long been the norm. To achieve this goal, directors focused on infrastructure management must advocatewith

2011 Rose Business Technologies, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Contact: http://www.rosebt.com/contact.html

Rose Business Technologies

Clarity - Simplicity - Productivity

the full support of key organizational stakeholdersthe adoption of common tools to their counterparts in application performance management. By eliminating the technological barriers that traditionally separate the two domains, these teams will be better positioned to develop a holistic management capability that spans silos, determines if the root cause lies in either the infrastructure or application itself and ensures the uptime of important business services. Uniting the tools used by application performance management personnel with existing infrastructure management solutions requires a vendor that can provide the out-of-the-box integration that enables the two departments to communicate with one another and work together to diagnose problems and drive quick resolutions. Though application performance management teams may be changing the tools they use day in, day out, the right solution should not diminish the importance of the individuals in the department. Rather, it should provide features that enhance their current abilities, while enabling the integration with infrastructure management tools needed for holistic, silo-free IT management. Uniting infrastructure and application performance management tools yields a host of new capabilities, enabling IT to: Discover infrastructure and application performance degradations before they become problems Link infrastructure and application performance to provide transparency across two domains that inadvertently impact one another Isolate, diagnose and triage the root cause, and dramatically reduce mean-time-to-repair Automatically notify appropriate personnel of issues Measure their impact on the business Manage their effects on the user experience The proper integrated management solution should provide: Automatic, real-time infrastructure and application discovery and dependency mapping Proactive performance monitoring and automated thresholding Physical and virtual systems monitoring, even for the most dynamic environments Application performance and end-user experience monitoring

To reap the benefits of these capabilities, infrastructure management professionals should reach

2011 Rose Business Technologies, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Contact: http://www.rosebt.com/contact.html

Rose Business Technologies

Clarity - Simplicity - Productivity

out to their counterparts on the application side of the business to discuss how the integration of best-of-breed tools will improve the individual and collective performance of each team, as well as satisfaction at the user and business levels. With a common, integrated solution fostering a culture of collaboration between teams, procedural changes become infinitely easier to achieve. By leveraging integrated resources that improve individual management capabilitieswhile enabling greater visibility between departmentsIT can evolve to a much more proactive state. Rather than waiting for the next alarm to sound, these teams will be poised to anticipate an issue, identify its source and eliminate it before the businessand its users and consumersare aware the problem existed. Moreover, personnel in these departments can prioritize the resolution of incidents and problems based on the potential impact to the businessenabling them to transition from restrictive, traditional policies to those that truly align IT with enterprise needs. A key outcome of integrating application performance management tools with an existing infrastructure management solution is a significant change in the mode of thought across these departmentsfrom individualism to a business-service-focused view. Shifting this paradigm emphasizes the importance of the services that IT supports and will, ultimately, forge a tighter bond between IT and the business. Rose suggests a solution that provides the application health information needed by both application support and application development teams, and helps to more precisely triage application problems to the network tier. To that aim, the solution: Measures and analyzes performance for all transactions and applications Compares response times against intelligent baselines and thresholds Identifies abnormal latencies in the infrastructure Isolates the problem to a specific link or application serverbe it physical or virtualor the application itself Delivers alerts on any performance deterioration The solution should feature: IT- and business-level metrics to triage issues affecting applications and understand their business impact Monitoring of all application traffic crossing the infrastructure to measure response time, identify latencies and isolate root causes

2011 Rose Business Technologies, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Contact: http://www.rosebt.com/contact.html