How To Improve Performance Monitoring

Transcription

1 Improving shared services and SLA accountability through application performance monitoring Written by Jeffrey Honeyman Introduction The escalation of shared services implementations in the public sector has emphasized the need for IT to deliver comprehensive performance and user experience metrics. Without them, organizations can t accurately measure common benchmarks that make shared services financially sound. To achieve this level of insight, organizations are increasingly turning to application performance monitoring (APM). Why? Traditionally, IT projects in the public sector government, education, and healthcare have been primarily driven by organizational and mission requirements, as well as by specific legislative or executive mandates. End-user requirements have been taken into consideration, but haven t always been primary drivers. After all, a mission or a mandate is a clear imperative, and not achieving one can have significant negative consequences for organizations and the individuals responsible for the effort. More and more, external trends are shaping the structure, implementation, and evaluation of the success of these projects. These include financial constraints, IT consumerization, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), cloud computing, and the recognition of the application as the component of IT most crucial to organizational success. Even though the public sector reacts slower to marketplace trends than the private sector, that is more a reflection of organizational culture and budget cycles than anything else. Both commercial and public IT infrastructures inhabit the same universe and are affected by broad, evolutionary changes in information technology and user preferences. While budget cycles typically slow down the rate of change in public sector IT, it isn t always the case; funding concerns can force states and municipalities to adopt new technologies more rapidly than, say, a large federal agency.

2 BYOD can overwhelm IT staff, particularly when they don t necessarily own the devices or have access to them for testing. Financial constraints While mandate-related projects sometimes come with dedicated funding, coming up with the money for unfunded mandates or market trendrelated initiatives is often a challenge. More and more, with capital budgets reduced, funding for such projects must come from the operational side of the ledger, which means implementing shared services and chargeback models to recover costs. That, in turn, requires establishing meaningful, measurable, and enforceable service level agreements (SLAs) with consumers (internal customers and external entities), and operational level agreements (OLAs) between the various internal contributors. Consumerization of IT and BYOD With smartphone and tablet use growing rapidly, more consumers than ever are accessing the Internet and IT services without using a PC. According to a 2012 Pew Foundation survey, 45% of U.S. adults now own a smartphone and 25% own a tablet. Gartner, Inc. calls BYOD the single most radical shift in the economics of client computing for business since PCs invaded the workplace. Public sector organizations may not always accommodate such trends as quickly as commercial enterprises, but they cannot be ignored if the public sector wishes to remain competitive for new workforce entrants. BYOD presents numerous challenges for IT. Security concerns are obvious. Managing many different devices can overwhelm IT staff, particularly when they don t necessarily own the devices or have access to them for testing purposes. Moving to the cloud Delivering services and applications from the cloud is even more of a game-changer for the public sector than it is for commercial enterprises. On the surface, cloud delivery can be viewed as a financial benefit, reducing infrastructure and support costs. However, cloud implementation has security and monitoring implications which can increase security cost and risk, making accurate monitoring against SLAs more challenging. Measuring the performance of a cloud-based service, especially when you don t have access to actual cloud infrastructure, is particularly problematic. The application becomes the key unit of IT Rather than fighting the not-particularlywinnable battle to control the large variety of physical devices being used, public sector IT needs to take its cues from the broader commercial sector and consumer behavior, where the app is the predominant unit of delivery. Applications or services like these must be securely delivered through a Web interface, as a standalone client application, or as a smartphone/tablet app. What is APM? Definitions of APM vary. Some definitions take a relatively narrow view of APM, encompassing only the specific components of applications interface, business rules, data stores and the like. However, that definition does not include the infrastructure elements which underlie many applications or services, which do have a significant impact on delivery and performance against SLAs. These infrastructure elements can include network performance, backup and recovery devices, and other physical components. For APM to have complete, real-world meaning when it comes to meeting performance metrics, it must have a scope which encompasses applicationspecific components, organization-wide infrastructure, and off-premise, cloudbased services. This has real financial impact when assigning responsibility for application or service degradation and outages. It s also a good reason for ensuring that shared services are accompanied not just by SLAs with customers, but by OLAs with supporting infrastructure 2

3 groups. For example, if an outage is caused by a network or storage problem, the responsible group must pay any SLArequired penalty. Without enterprisewide APM, making such determinations can be difficult, if not impossible. Effective APM must start and end with accurately measuring the end-user experience. This means more than simply measuring uptime and downtime. It means measuring latency and performance against the expectations of end users, who pay for shared services from their own constrained funding sources. Enterprise APM is essential to meet SLAs While APM, at an operational level, is concerned with technical metrics, it is most importantly a business-related function. APM connects service delivery with organization-wide mission and financial stability. In government, education, and healthcare, accurate and effective APM across the enterprise is essential for organizations to meet SLA metrics and recover costs to achieve the key financial requirement of public sector shared services breaking even. Enterprise APM takes the entire application stack into consideration, from user interface to underlying infrastructure, physical, virtual, or cloud. Since almost all organizations have some level of monitoring functionality in place, an effective enterprise APM solution must be able to consume and integrate data from all existing monitoring infrastructure to present accurate, real-world measurements of service uptime, downtime, and other performance metrics. Along with quantifying performance against SLAs and OLAs, enterprise APM must provide IT staff with the means of troubleshooting performance issues and identifying root causes in realtime, to help them quickly remediate performance outages and service degradation. Enterprise APM must also enable IT to be proactive, to spot issues before they affect service delivery and to provide resource consumption and trending data for capacity planning which continually stays a step, or more, ahead of demand. For public sector leadership, whose concerns are at the business, not the operational level, an enterprise APM solution must provide the single plane of glass which lets organizational leaders ascertain the status of each shared service as a whole. This is essential in assessing performance against SLAs, OLAs, financial projections, and funded and unfunded mandates. The challenge in accomplishing all of this is that large IT infrastructures are quite heterogeneous, and despite many initiatives to consolidate and optimize, becoming even more so based on the external trends mentioned earlier. This places an additional burden on the APM solution. Few offerings in this area have the capability to cover all of these components and provide comprehensive enterprise APM. Such a solution must provide accurate measurement of service components no matter their environment physical, virtual, or cloud. While APM for physical environments is the most mature of these, to provide meaningful output, APM must be able to monitor the complete application stack, including network and server infrastructure. APM for virtualized services must be able to work with either of the currentlydominant hypervisors VMware and Hyper-V assessing performance of the virtualized components of the service, including virtual machine operating systems, virtual networking, and virtual storage, as well as the physical VM hosts, network, and storage associated with the service. To provide meaningful output, APM must be able to monitor the complete application stack, including network and server infrastructure. 3

4 The increase in shared services implementations in government, education, and healthcare has emphasized the need for APM solutions. Cloud-based services are particularly challenging. Cloud providers are not always willing, or even capable, of providing sufficient access to APM solutions. This is fundamental to the architecture and business models of cloud solutions, which are designed around abstracting their internal infrastructure. In such cases, IT organizations are left with few options. They can accept providers own presentations of SLA compliance data as standalone information, they can use that information as a direct feed into their APM solution, or they can use their APM solution to act as a client for the service and generate synthetic transactions from which end-user experience can be measured against SLA targets. Finally, enterprise APM must overlay existing management and monitoring infrastructure. Few government agencies, education institutions, or healthcare organizations have the resources or the desire to rip out numerous existing tools, many of which provide useful information for operational management and monitoring of individual application or service components. Moreover, these tools often lack sufficient scope to be useful by themselves as authoritative sources of SLA compliance. Enterprise APM provides the integration of these existing sources into a single view which provides leadership with at-a-glance information on how a shared service is performing against its SLAs, financial plan, and organizational mission. Conclusion The increase in shared services implementations in government, education, and healthcare has emphasized the need for APM solutions which effectively cover the complete range of physical and virtual application components and provide comprehensive performance and user experience metrics for on-premise, cloud-based, and hybrid services. Without these capabilities, providers can not present accurate, real-world measurement of performance against the SLAs which make shared services financially sound. About Foglight Quest Software, now a part of Dell, offers Foglight, an industry-leading APM solution that helps your organization meet SLAs, improve the end-user experience, and make shared services successful. About the Author Jeffrey Honeyman is a public sector software expert for Dell. He began his career as a news writer in New York City and brings nearly 20 years of broadcasting experience to his current position, along with more than 15 years of expertise as an IT technologist, architect and manager. His responsibilities include keeping Dell enterprise software customers current on government mandates and on how Dell solutions help meet them. 4

5 For More Information 2012 Dell, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This document contains proprietary information protected by copyright. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording for any purpose without the written permission of Dell, Inc. ( Dell ). Dell, Dell Software, the Dell Software logo and products as identified in this document are registered trademarks of Dell, Inc. in the U.S.A. and/or other countries. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners. The information in this document is provided in connection with Dell products. No license, express or implied, by estoppel or otherwise, to any intellectual property right is granted by this document or in connection with the sale of Dell products. EXCEPT AS SET FORTH IN DELL S TERMS AND CONDITIONS AS SPECIFIED IN THE LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR THIS PRODUCT, DELL ASSUMES NO LIABILITY WHATSOEVER AND DISCLAIMS ANY EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY WARRANTY RELATING TO ITS PRODUCTS INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, OR NON-INFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL DELL BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE, SPECIAL OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF PROFITS, BUSINESS INTERRUPTION OR LOSS OF INFORMATION) ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THIS DOCUMENT, EVEN IF DELL HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. Dell makes no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this document and reserves the right to make changes to specifications and product descriptions at any time without notice. Dell does not make any commitment to update the information contained in this document. About Dell Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) listens to customers and delivers worldwide innovative technology, business solutions and services they trust and value. For more information, visit If you have any questions regarding your potential use of this material, contact: Dell Software 5 Polaris Way Aliso Viejo, CA Refer to our Web site for regional and international office information. BusinessBrief-APMPS-US-VG