Users. Extending Visibility Across Your TIBCO Infrastructure and Beyond

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1 White Paper Application Performance Management (APM) for TIBCO Users Extending Visibility Across Your TIBCO Infrastructure and Beyond Publication Date: October 2008 Abstract: TIBCO users may wish to expand IT monitoring and management beyond their TIBCO infrastructure. Many SL customers have chosen to extend their TIBCO monitoring and visualization application to a broader Application Performance Management (APM) solution, delivering single-pane-of-glass visibility across their heterogeneous application and IT infrastructure. APM focuses on monitoring and managing the performance and service availability of software applications. Enterprise companies are increasingly seeking holistic, or 360, APM solutions, capable of monitoring and managing a broad range of applications, in order to: Provide early detection/preventative care relating to application issues to reduce the number of trouble tickets. Determine root cause more quickly and have the power to fix a problem then-and-there in order to reduce the MTTR (mean time to repair) and minimize impact on customer experience, SLAs and revenue. Deliver a comprehensive, integrated solution that reduces overall TCO and makes the goal end-to-end application monitoring and control attainable.

2 Copyright 2008 Sherrill-Lubinski Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Trademarks SL Corporation, SL-GMS RTView, RTView, and the SL logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sherrill-Lubinski Corporation in the United States and other countries. TIBCO, the TIBCO logo, The Power of Now, Hawk, Rendezvous, Enterprise Message Service, PortalBuilder, Integration Manager, SmartSockets, ActivePortal and TIB are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of TIBCO Software, Inc. in the United States and other countries. They are mentioned in this document for identification purposes only. 2 Copyright 2009 Sherrill-Lubinski Corporation

3 Contents Introduction... 4 Application Performance Management Solutions... 5 The Challenge... 5 The Value of APM... 6 Service Performance Management... 6 Capacity Planning... 7 Chargeback or Service Usage Analysis... 7 Required Functionality for an Effective APM Solution... 7 How Enterprise RTView Delivers APM for TIBCO Users... 8 Access to All Critical Service Metrics... 8 Define the Hierarchy and Rules of a Business Service Model... 8 Supply Real-Time Analytic Processing of the Service Metrics Against the... 9 Archive Analytic Processing for Historical Comparisons Allow Definition of Automated Behavior Based on Rules Provide Configurable Dashboards for Summary and Drilldown Service Views Conclusion About SL Corporation Copyright 2009 Sherrill-Lubinski Corporation

4 Introduction RTView for TIBCO is a software application developed by SL Corporation that enables users to leverage their TIBCO investment by dramatically enhancing visibility into their infrastructure. RTView provides a flexible, configurable, out-of-the-box solution to help enterprises optimize their monitoring of TIBCO Enterprise Message Service, TIBCO Hawk and TIBCO Rendezvous applications by visually presenting real-time and archived data from the TIBCO Information Bus (TIB) and other data sources, all without programming. TIBCO users may wish to expand application monitoring and management beyond their TIBCO infrastructure. Many SL customers have chosen to extend their TIBCO monitoring and visualization solution to a broader Application Performance Management (APM) solution, delivering single-pane-of-glass visibility across their heterogeneous application infrastructure. RTView provides out-of-box functionality for monitoring and administering TIBCO applications The purpose of this whitepaper is to review a number of ways TIBCO users are able to manage the performance of TIBCO, packaged, and custom applications by extending visibility beyond their TIBCO infrastructure to other data sources and applications, thereby delivering a comprehensive APM solution. 4 Copyright 2009 Sherrill-Lubinski Corporation

5 Application Performance Management Solutions Application Performance Management, or APM, focuses on monitoring and managing the performance and service availability of software applications. Demand for a new generation of APM products is being driven out of a frustration with earlier solutions that either only focus on a narrow slice of monitoring, or have cobbled together monitoring tools through acquisition, and therefore cannot provide a single interface to the end-toend performance of an application. The Challenge In the last ten years, systems management tools have become essential to every large IT organization, providing a certain level of single-pane of-glass visibility for network and systems management needs. Level 1 operation support teams use these integrated tools to recognize when applications or IT components are failing and provide automated responses and trouble ticket management. The downside with these systems is that they are component-based and cannot measure or determine any potential business impact of a particular component failure. This makes it very difficult to determine how to prioritize problem resolution or whom to notify in the event of service impact. Technical Service teams whose responsibility it is to maintain the performance of individual IT infrastructure components and Application Support teams are often the level 2 and level 3 support groups that try to cobble together a variety of off-the-shelf and home-grown monitoring tools to determine business impact. This is done with the goal of understanding how to best respond to trouble tickets related to their systems. These tools may range from applications that monitor middleware, transactions, application servers, JVMs, and databases, to reams of server log files that must be manually reviewed. In large organizations, this has given rise to hundreds of dashboards and folklore about best practices for troubleshooting service problems. Many organizations now realize that they must standardize around a common and comprehensive 360 single-pane of-glass visibility solution for application performance management to make any sense of the large amount of real-time data available, and to reduce costs for maintenance and training associated with continuing their traditional practices. They need early detection/preventative care to reduce the number of trouble tickets. They need to determine root cause more quickly and have the power to fix a 5 Copyright 2009 Sherrill-Lubinski Corporation

6 problem then-and-there in order to reduce the MTTR (mean time to repair) and minimize impact on customer experience, SLAs and revenue. And they need a comprehensive, integrated solution that reduces overall TCO and makes the goal endto-end application monitoring and control attainable. In addition to getting pressure to reduce the number of trouble tickets and MTTR, application support teams are also being asked to provide line-of-business stakeholders with visibility into performance management as it relates to business objectives. They also have pressure from the CIO to manage toward ITIL standards for Incident Management, Availability, Capacity and Service Level Management. The Value of APM APM has a wide audience of potential users in an organization who can benefit from visibility into application and component metrics including: Operations Application Support Teams Technical Services Development Key Business Stakeholders Service End Users Once given a customizable view of applications and the infrastructure metrics that effect those applications, many people in these roles quickly find a wide variety of key initiatives that can be implemented to increase performance, optimize expenditures and reduce costs. Three of the most common initiatives are Service Performance Management, Capacity Planning, and Usage Analysis. Service Performance Management Service Performance Management is the reason that most organizations initially place APM as a high priority for IT investment. This may be because there are well-defined internal or external SLAs that need to be monitored, or because the IT group is measured by its ability to reduce both the number of incidents and trouble ticket response times. Unfortunately, many companies wait until service downtimes have resulted in huge losses in either direct revenue or penalties before the implementation of an APM solution is made a top priority. In either case, it is just as important to look at 6 Copyright 2009 Sherrill-Lubinski Corporation

7 trends and have proactive measures for predicting and preventing an incident as it is to have automated and rapid analysis and drilldown to reduce response times. Capacity Planning Organizations generally have mandates to forecast potential growth and then optimally prepare and allocate the necessary resources. By archiving and analyzing the historical usage of IT components as related to a particular application, it is possible to have the detailed information necessary to fine tune required expenditures and increase confidence that service levels will be met for the forecasted growth. Chargeback or Service Usage Analysis Managing IT costs can be difficult when trying to manage applications for a wide variety of business units. Many enterprises are leveraging APM to enforce a chargeback policy so that IT costs can be tracked as a line-of-business expenditure. However, even if an organization does not want to introduce detailed chargeback analysis for usage of IT services by a department of business unit, great benefits can be found in understanding those usage levels. Questions such as, Are my IT expenditures in-line with my strategic business initiatives? or Why is this particular business unit showing such an increase in usage? can be answered. Required Functionality for an Effective APM Solution Any enterprise-class APM solution must contain these component features to be effective and have the ability to address expanding business and IT alignment initiatives. Access to all critical application and component-level metrics Definition of a service model Real-time analytic processing of infrastructure metrics against the service model Ability to archive service model metrics for analysis Define automated response to alert conditions Provide configurable dashboards and reports 7 Copyright 2009 Sherrill-Lubinski Corporation

8 How RTView Delivers APM for TIBCO Users SL's RTView platform is uniquely positioned to service the requirements of 360 APM because 1) it has the ability to provide a single, real-time view into complex, multitier applications with historical context, 2) it was developed from the ground up as an integrated system, enabling seamless analysis across applications and layers, and drill-down capabilities to pinpoint root cause and initiate repair, and 3) it is a flexible environment for the creation of holistic application service views that is easy and non-invasive to integrate, and cost-effective to deploy and maintain. Access to All Critical Application and Component-Level Metrics RTView provides access to the critical TIBCO infrastructure metrics from TIBCO EMS, TIBCO Hawk, TIBCO Rendezvous and TIBCO BusinessWorks. However, TIBCO users may have other metrics that are relevant to the performance of the applications such as status information from application servers, databases, networks, and specialized monitoring agents and systems such as HP OpenView, Microsoft MOM, Oracle Enterprise Manager, Symantec i3 or other systems. These metrics can be made available via a variety of RTView data adapters including JMX, SQL, SNMP, Splunk or custom data adapters. Define the Hierarchy and Rules of a Service Model The Service Model is a hierarchical definition which starts from the low-level infrastructure metrics and bubbles up to define intermediate infrastructure components that then define the health and performance of a particular application. Using the RTView Alert Management System, users can define these Service Models which can then be used to drive dashboards and reports, allowing them to look at top-level Service status and drill down to their applicable metrics. 8 Copyright 2009 Sherrill-Lubinski Corporation

9 Definition of the service model To facilitate the creation of the Service Model, alert templates can be defined and parameterized. For example, perhaps a generic status template could be created to model BusinessWorks and then multiple BusinessWorks instances could use the same template. Supply Real-Time Analytic Processing of the Service Metrics Against the Service Model Once the Service Model is defined, it is then loaded into the RTView Server. The Server continually performs the calculations necessary to determine the state of the Service Model by applying the current values of the infrastructure metrics in real time. Any layer of the Service Model can be enabled or disabled, and thresholds for alert rules can be modified at runtime without re-loading the Service Model definition. This is often important, for example, when certain parts of the IT service structure need to be brought down for maintenance while others remain live, and when unusual circumstances require that alert thresholds be temporarily modified to reduce a deluge of alarms. 9 Copyright 2009 Sherrill-Lubinski Corporation

10 Archive Analytic Processing for Historical Comparisons The RTView Historian provides the perfect solution for archiving application metrics by allowing you to select any level of the Service Model and save time-stamped metrics in the relational database of your choice. This data can then be used in dashboards that allow you to perform activities such as analyzing performance trends, performing dynamic baseline alerting, managing capacity planning, or providing an audit-trail report. Allow Definition of Automated Behavior Based on Rules Any layer of the Service Model can define automated behavior based on its state. That behavior might be to send an ; write a log entry to a database; or invoke a Hawk method, a system script, or a variety of other actions including custom commands which can be written using a Java API. Provide Configurable Dashboards for Summary and Drilldown Service Views Many APM solutions only allow for a fixed path to drill down through a series of colored circles to diagnose a performance problem. This often results in only a very few, highly trained operations staff who can truly be effective at getting what they need out of the solution. It also means that most solutions have a pre-conceived and limited notion of the parameters and initiatives that may need to be addressed once a wider audience gains access to application management. RTView allows for the creation of complete, customizable RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) that can specifically address custom APM initiatives. These RIAs can be created quite simply without programming using the RTView Builder. This means that application support specialists can gather requirements from business and development teams and proceed to implement the solution without having to be experts in Adobe Flex, AJAX, or any of the other shifting popular Web development environments. Though it is obvious that drilling down through trees of colored circles would not be an effective way to perform capacity planning or usage analysis, it should be noted that it is also not very efficient for looking at application performance. Support teams, business stakeholders and end users all have very different ways that they want to look at application performance. 10 Copyright 2009 Sherrill-Lubinski Corporation

11 For example, a top-level view of the services supported by various applications of an organization might show a physical view of those services against a map. Top-level physical service view Or, a top-level view might show a logical view of the application that shows relationships between dependent components. Top-level logical service view 11 Copyright 2009 Sherrill-Lubinski Corporation

12 A drill down from an application could be to a detailed and very specialized panel that shows key metrics from various infrastructure components that support that application. Key metrics supporting an application The underlying infrastructure metrics can also be specialized and interactive so that the operator can drill down and look at different slices of the infrastructure data to quickly diagnose problems. 12 Copyright 2009 Sherrill-Lubinski Corporation

13 Detailed infrastructure metrics SL s RTView has a broad appeal as a 360 APM solution, regardless of what stage an organization is at in delivering against APM requirements. For organizations that do not already have an APM solution, RTView can monitor and report on all aspects of the application environment and provide immediate value to application development, engineering teams, as well as operations and management teams; For organizations that already have tools to monitor components of the application infrastructure, RTView can fill the monitoring gaps that exist, as well as provide an overall analytics engine for the events, an alerts/rules engine, and a robust presentation layer if desired; For organizations that already have monitoring tools and an overall enterprise management system, RTView can perform the tough job of aggregating application data and pinpointing the root cause of the application problem. 13 Copyright 2009 Sherrill-Lubinski Corporation

14 Conclusion To be competitive today, companies need to be agile and responsive to the shifting daily needs of customers, internal operations, sales channels, and marketing. The complex architecture required to support these business processes means that important business information can reside in a variety of disparate locations. Each role in the enterprise needs its own specialized, aggregated set of that information to make timely business decisions for their areas of responsibility. Requirements within the enterprise can change daily and necessitate that each group of inter-related job roles be able to configure views into that data and distribute that information to their colleagues, suppliers or customers. RTView provides TIBCO users with a cost-effective, quickly implemented, and flexible solution for aggregating disparate enterprise data and delivering a complete 360 APM solution. RTView is unique because it can provide value both as a holistic APM platform, as well as a point APM solution focused on specific application monitoring. It does so through a robust set of monitoring capabilities that can directly monitor application performance data, or integrate existing sources of data from other application monitoring solutions. With all of the data in a single information layer, RTView provides comprehensive analysis functionality, alerts and rules, and can easily construct an overall service model of application performance. This performance data may include middleware, network performance data, application servers, log files or just about any other source of information. With the models developed, RTView s information layer can forward the information to its own presentation layer, or process intelligent events that will help identify the root cause of the performance issue via an enterprise manager of managers. With RTView, enterprise infrastructure information can not only be configured to just monitor a specific sub-system of the enterprise, but also tailored to fit a specific business role and provide daily information tailored to the needs of that role. The information is there. Making it immediately accessible in an easily interpreted form dramatically enhances business practices. 14 Copyright 2009 Sherrill-Lubinski Corporation

15 About SL Corporation Over the past 24 years, SL Corporation has become the most knowledgeable and responsive provider of real-time monitoring, analytics, and visibility solutions. SL s flagship product, RTView, addresses a broad spectrum of operational visibility challenges spanning application performance management (APM), business activity monitoring (BAM), and component-level infrastructure monitoring. RTView also has become the de facto standard for extending the visualization of complex event processing (CEP) engines, TIBCO messaging middleware, Oracle Coherence data grids, and custom applications. SL s exclusive focus on real-time visibility solutions, commitment to customer success, and partner-centric culture are why thousands of industry leaders have chosen to work with SL to support their most critical applications and businesses. SL Corporation can be reached at or on the web at 15 Copyright 2009 Sherrill-Lubinski Corporation

16 Contact Information SL Corporation 240 Tamal Vista Blvd. Corte Madera, CA For more information regarding RTView for TIBCO, please visit: