Riverbed Performance Management Messaging Framework Market trends and context Increasingly, business performance = application performance. Users rely on applications to reach customers, build products, automate business processes, and perform almost every other task critical to the business. For IT organizations, application performance and availability are the most visible indicators of their success. Accordingly, IT organizations are changing the way they manage performance to be more holistic and application focused. In 2012, EMA found that 81% of respondents regularly leverage cross-domain teams to tackle and manage application performance. Gartner also found, in 2012, that 20% of the Global 2000 are trying to reconstruct their entire IT operational process framework in a way that shifts the central focus to the monitoring and management of applications, rather than infrastructure. As applications have become more critical they also have become more complex. The introduction of Service-oriented architectures, agile development processes and DevOps are all causing applications to sprawl, increase in complexity, while also increase the rate new applications are rolled out and changed. At the same time the introduction of new IT infrastructure technologies, most importantly virtualization and cloud, has increased the complexity of the infrastructure over which applications run. These are the market trends facing our customers and potential customers in IT operations, application support, Line of Business developers and operations, and network management. Customer Challenges In the face of these market trends, IT and application teams are faced with the following challenges: Troubleshooting and recovering from business disrupting application failures: Downtime of business critical applications has a direct impact on a business top and bottom line. When application outages occur, it is imperative that IT operations, application and network teams are able to detect, isolate and fix the problem as quickly as possible. It can often take days, if not weeks to isolate and fix performance problems, and problems are often only discovered after end users call in. The inability to perform when the application is down is not the type of spotlight application and IT teams want, but is one they often find themselves in with legacy performance management tools. Failure or delay in finding and fixing recurring and persistent performance problems Intermittent and chronic performance problems negatively impact end-user satisfaction and productivity. While these types of problems are unlikely to generate a help desk ticket, they are very likely to get the Apps team / CIO beat up and to continually block IT from focusing on adding new value to the business. Inability to detect problems earlier to prevent future disruption
IT usually finds out about performance problems from end-users, after business has already been impacted. According to Gartner, 70% of performance problems are reported by endusers. IT needs to detect problems more proactively, so that they are working on isolating and fixing the problem even before business is impacted. Proactively ensure data center migrations, consolidation, expanded deployments, new release, new users are protected from application performance issues: When businesses virtualize, consolidate or migrate their data centers to the cloud, they expect to improve flexibility, cost, and control, but do not expect to negatively impact application performance. When rolling out new applications or expanding existing deployments, it is critical to ensure that the performance business requires will be delivered. Without the right tools to manage and predict the effects of such infrastructure or application changes on application performance, however, businesses often find themselves dealing with unforeseen performance problems. Executive & Business Level Reporting Application performance is not a single group s responsibility and has broad implications across IT operations, application teams and business owners. It is imperative in this world of heightened application focus, that IT be able to communicate broadly and in languages tailored to technical and business audiences about application performance. Summary: The bottom line is that application performance = business performance. Legacy tools provide only a fragmented view, while IT operations are overloaded with raw data but lack actionable intelligence. As a result, problem identification, diagnosis, and resolution take days and weeks instead of minutes. And it can be difficult to communicate the consolidated, cross-functional view of what is really going on with application performance. This current state of application performance management results in significant negative impact to business via: Revenue loss Customer dissatisfaction Productivity loss Dissatisfaction with IT Riverbed Performance Management Approach Today s complex application infrastructure requires a performance management solution that looks across all critical parts of the application delivery chain. Whether you are rolling out new applications, consolidating or virtualizing data centers, or migrating to the cloud, managing application performance requires a holistic view that includes: end user experience monitoring, application transaction tracing & component monitoring, and underlying infrastructure and network performance management. End user experience. What is the end user actually experiencing as they interact with the application? Whether using web or thick client applications, and regardless if users are local, around the world, or mobile, you must be able to monitor and troubleshoot the ultimate measure of application performance: the end-user s
experience. Transaction Tracing & Component Monitoring. What an end user perceives as a single operation involves many distinct application transaction across many different application components. How do you track, monitor and troubleshoot the performance of each of these critical transactions and dive deep into the various components of the application? Infrastructure and Network Performance Management. How is the performance and availability of the underlying IT infrastructure and network contributing to the performance of the application? IT infrastructure exists for one reason, to deliver applications. To really understand holistic application performance, infrastructure must be managed through the lens of the application. The network in particular is a critical application component whose importance continues to rise with the move to cloud, mobile, SDN and network virtualization. RPM Messaging Architecture Key messages Riverbed Performance Management (RPM) gives IT visibility and actionable insight to deliver the application performance users and the business demand. RPM s unique combination of end-user experience monitoring, transaction tracing, deep component monitoring, and IT infrastructure / network management maximizes the performance, availability, and productivity of critical applications. Business Needs Faster troubleshooting and problem resolution Eliminate finger pointing that results when one group looks at performance only from their point of view and says it s not their problem Need answers not data - need the insights to actually do something to address performance Need a better way to identify root cause across all IT domains Need to see the complete picture of all contributing sources to application performance Vendor accountability - Need better data to show vendors when a problem resides in application Align performance management with the needs of actual users: Measure response time and availability the way real users are experiencing it Improve IT efficiency Eliminate the war room for blackouts Eliminate tiger teams that spend months trying to solve chronic performance problems Present a consolidated view so that network, infrastructure, application and business teams have a common understanding of application performance Communicate to senior leaders and the broader organization that IT is delivering the level of service they need Proactive management of application performance
Understand application dependencies so that applications don t break after DC migration, rolling out of application updates, or expanding to new users. Stop using end-users as canaries in a coal mine - Gartner says 70% of problems are reported by end users Uncover chronic problems you never hear about: brownout issues never get reported until it reaches highest level; you have to rely on the squeaky wheel Eliminate the business impact of brownouts Slow loss of productivity over time Leverage analytics to automatically Baseline performance and detect performance problems as soon as they emerge Fix chronic problems before LOB complains Streamline communication between application support, development, infrastructure and network teams pre-production or prior to migrations and consolidations Key Benefits Rapidly diagnose the root cause of performance problems Identify more problems faster by seeing all components of application delivery including underlying IT infrastructure and the network Identify performance problems sooner and avoid impact to the business (lower support costs, greater customer satisfaction) with advanced analytics that detect, isolate and pinpoint performance problems Eliminate the war room that takes IT resources away from more strategic projects Prevent finger-pointing Dramatically improve IT efficiency Streamline communication among IT teams (faster development lifecycles, lower support costs, fewer project failures) Leverage intuitive dashboards and reporting which present the relevant information to both business and IT stakeholders for a common understanding of application performance Quickly assign the appropriate teams to the appropriate problem Understand how critical applications are performing with easy-to-digest performance snapshots Proactively manage performance problems Apply analytics to automate analysis to detect, isolate and pinpoint performance problems before business is impacted Application dependency mapping; understand the landscape of dependencies for applications across all IT assets to understand impact analysis and to ensure all critical parts of the application deliver chain are being monitored Enable faster, more accurate planning to minimize the impact of IT changes such as data center migrations. Key Differentiation Complete Visibility: Bring together the complete application picture: end user, application transactions, IT and network infrastructure Real Answers: Apply big data analytics to automate analysis and troubleshooting, dramatically accelerating problem diagnosis and improving IT efficiency Right Information: Present the relevant information about application performance to a
wide range of audiences, business and IT Sound bites Target Audience Fastest path to problem resolution eliminate the war room Go from clobberation to collaboration Tame the Tiger Don t be on a tiger team Stop using your end-users as canaries for detecting application performance problems Migrations, application roll outs, infrastructure changes can all break applications make sure yours doesn t IT change doesn t have to be a leap of faith, it can be a leap of fact 1. Application Operations: App Support Team 2. Applications (LOB): higher level, strategic role, held accountable for applications from development to operations; responsible for ensuring that apps are accessible and delivers the performance users and business demand 3. Infrastructure & Operations Team: owns 55% of the IT budget. Major target is the network team (network engineering, network ops ), may also include application ops accountable for user experience; Solution Descriptions For External Communication Headline 25-Word Riverbed Performance Management (RPM) gives IT visibility and actionable insight to deliver the application performance users and the business demand. RPM s unique combination of end-user experience monitoring, transaction tracing, deep component monitoring, and IT infrastructure / network management maximizes the performance, availability, and productivity of critical applications. 50-Word 100-Word Riverbed Performance Management (RPM) gives IT visibility and actionable insight to deliver the application performance users and the business demand. RPM s unique combination of end-user experience monitoring, transaction tracing, deep component monitoring, and IT infrastructure / network management maximizes the performance, availability, and productivity of critical applications. Whether you are rolling out new applications, expanding the scale of an existing application, consolidating or virtualizing data centers, or migrating to the cloud, managing application performance requires a holistic view that includes: end-user experience monitoring, transaction tracing, deep component monitoring, and IT infrastructure / network performance management. Riverbed Performance Management (RPM) gives IT visibility and actionable insight to deliver the application performance users and the business demand. RPM applies analytics to automate analysis and troubleshooting, dramatically accelerating problem diagnosis and improving IT efficiency. Intuitive dashboards and reporting present the right information to the wide range of audiences, across both business and IT, concerned about application performance.