Managing Your Application Performance

Are you are planning to implement new IT projects such as data center consolidation, server virtualization, cloud computing, or perhaps adding new applications on the network? Do you understand exactly how these upgrades will affect the existing applications and the user experience? What strategy are you going to use to ensure application performance is not compromised? It is imperative that you understand how each of the components can affect overall application performance.

A Strategy you can use to Manage Application Performance (APM)

Most companies have some sort of visibility of their network systems via the network elements, but a healthy infrastructure does not necessarily mean that your applications are running efficiently because they do nothing to monitor the actual transaction. There are many different components to APM, so what capabilities do you need to accurately monitor, measure, and troubleshoot?

6 Components of Application Monitoring

Monitoring the End-user Experience is quite different from Infrastructure Monitoring. We actually measure the end-user experience so we see what they see.

Measures response time and availability from the end user’s perspective
Aligns performance management with the needs of business users

Application Mapping is a separate dimension to APM this takes the different bits about applications and maps them together so you can trace an application and its dependencies/relationships across the network.

Discover application components and their relationships
Fundamental for managing an application

Transaction Following/Tracing is a critical component is being able to trace transactions on the network through multiple servers that all communicate to make up an application.

apmcomponents3 Transaction Following Tracing

Follow transactions through application tiers and components
Trace performance of each transaction at the code level
Holistic view of transactions from end-to-end

Deep Application Component Monitoring – deep inside the system that runs the code allows you to get to the fine detail, and why there may be application issues.

apmcomponents4 Deep Application Component Monitoring

Collect fine-grained metrics from application internals, including code-level performance
Produce detail needed for real-time analytics and true root cause analysis
Complemented by broad infrastructure performance information

Network-Aware APM – is another form of data collection because the network is where applications travel, and the network team usually gets called to solve problems first.

The network is the backplane of modern applications
Understand impact of network performance on application behaviour
Provides tracing and visibility for ALL applications

Analytics – There is a tremendous amount of information as you collect data across 100’s of applications and perhaps millions of transactions. You need to collect and store that data efficiently to be able to trend, analyze, and solve problems with it

Store and index large amounts of performance data
Automatically extract anomalous behaviour, correlate information, identify the root cause of problems, and predict events and performance trends
Reveals valuable information to alert staff and resolve problems faster

With these 6 elements covered you will have complete visibility and will be able to effectively manage application performance and minimize user impact going forward.

Learn More Here

Healthcare IT Reveals Network Rx

IT Heroes: A Prescription for Network Health

Each and every day, the bold men and women of IT risk it all to deliver critical applications and services. Their stories are unique. Their triumphs inspire. For the first time ever, the IT Heroes Series offers a revealing glimpse into the secrets and strategies that have won accolades for network teams around the world – and could do the same for you.

Initial Symptoms

Located in South West England, the Northern Devon National Health Service (NHS) trust serves a population of just under half a million. Operating across 1,300 square miles and providing vital IT services to a large district medical center and 17 community hospitals is serious business.

When the network slowed to a crawl, Network Technology Specialist, Peter Lee and his team were motivated to provide a fast diagnosis.

Tools of the Trade

Since many life-saving tests and medical information are communicated via the healthcare network, it was critical for the team to get everything back on track fast. After receiving complaints about the “slow network,” Lee tested it out for himself. Like end users, he also experienced a series of timed-out sessions.

“I used Observer® GigaStor™ Retrospective Network Analysis to rewind the data, putting a filter on the machine. All that was coming back was SOPHOS,” says Lee, regarding the popular security software. “I widened the search to the subnet. It was an 11 minute capture with 25,000 hits on SOPHOSXL.net.”

Lee and his team had a hunch that the traffic from the SOPHOS application was abnormally high and hogging valuable network resources. But how could they prove it?

“I went back to a previous capture that I had run last February,” says Lee, referring to an ad hoc baseline established months before. “In some 20 minutes, the average was only 3,000 hits.”

With the previous network snapshot from GigaStor, the team was able to prove that the application traffic had drastically increased and was undoubtedly the cause of the slow network.

An Rx for a Network Fix

“We’ve got a call open with the SOPHOS senior team looking into this,” says Lee. “It works out to between 33 to 50 percent of all our DNS traffic is going out to SOPHOS. Without the GigaStor, I would have never known about the problem. It’s simple, it’s easy, and it’s fantastic.”

Find out how this IT Hero found the hardware issue that brought the network to its knees, and how his team uses Wireshark to troubleshoot on the go. Download the full Northern Devon NHS Case Study now.

Thanks to VIAVI for the article.

application aware network performance management Network Management Network Monitoring Network Monitoring Software Network Performance

Ixia’s new Ebook- The Network Through a New Lens: How a Visibility Architecture Sharpens the View

“Enter the Visibility Architecture”

“Buying more tools to deal with spiraling demands is counter-productive – it’s like trying to simplify a problem by increasing complexity. Visibility merits its own architecture, capable of addressing packet access and packet stream management. A visibility architecture that collects, manages, and distributes packet streams for monitoring and analysis is ideal for cost-savings, reliability, and resilience. The economic advantages of such end to-end visibility are beyond debate.

An architectural approach to visibility allows IT to respond to the immediate and long-range demands of growth, management, access, control, and cost issues. This architecture can optimize the performance and value of tools already in place, without incurring major capital and operational costs. With the ability to see into applications, a team can drill down instantly from high-level metrics to granular details, pinpoint root causes and take action at the first—or even before the first – sign of trouble – lowering Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) dramatically.

A scalable visibility architecture provides resilience and control without adding complexity. Because lack of access is a major factor in creating blind spots, a visibility architecture provides ample access for monitoring and security tools: network taps offer reliable access points, while NPBs contribute the advanced filtering, aggregation, deduplication, and other functions that make sure these tools see only traffic of interest.

Application- and session-aware capabilities contribute higher intelligence and analytical capabilities to the architecture, while policy and element management capabilities help automate processes and integrate with existing management systems. Packet-based monitoring and analysis offers the best view into the activity, health, and performance of the infrastructure. Managing a visibility architecture requires an intuitive visual/ graphical interface that is easy to use and provides prompt feedback on operations – otherwise, architecture can become just another complexity to deal with.”

The Ixia Network Visibility Architecture encompasses network and virtual taps, as well as inline bypass switches; inline and out-of-band NPBs; application-aware and session aware monitoring, and a management layer.

Download the ebook here

Thanks to Network World for the article.

application aware network performance management Network Access Network Management Network Performance Network Taps