Unpublished White Paper: Application and network performance alignment to IT best practices This white paper briefly describes best practices; highlights IT best practices; and discusses in detail IT business service management, the importance of application performance management (APM) automation, and the capabilities and benefits of Fluke Networks, Visual TruView APM solution. TABLE OF CONTENTS» Best practices» Business service management» Business service management transition» Application availability and performance» APM alignment to IT best practices» Visual TruView application performance management» Brief overview of network-based APM» Deploy» Manage» Solve» Optimize» Conclusion 1 of 9
Best practices Over time, competition, innovation and maturation of certain sectors and business functions drive the creation and implementation of best practices. Industry sector examples such as construction and manufacturing have been well documented and benchmarked as significant best practice examples. Business performance improvements driven bybest practice adoption in these industries are quantified and empirical. In contrast, technology can be characterized as emerging in this regard, just beginning to fully focus on best practices disciplines. IT best practices can be summarized as a set of methods, techniques, processes, behaviors and automation that when consistently applied produce increasingly effective and efficient results. The portfolio of available IT process frameworks (ITIL, CMMI, etc), standards, methodologies and automation solutions is extensive. The primary goal of IT best practices is to optimize the alignment and utilization of technology resources toward the execution of business objectives. Business service management Business service management (BSM) is a key area of focus within IT best practices. BSM is the practice of quantifying, monitoring, measuring, reporting and managing IT services from a business perspective. Examples of business services include application performance and availability, fulfillment of basic services (such as a new account opening), desktop support and many others. Prior to best practice adoption, a majority of IT organizations delivered services from a technology silo or domain perspective. Technology domains include mainframes and networks. Domain-based management and reporting resulted in misalignment of expectations and results between IT and business stakeholders. The misalignment drove the need for a perspective change to business service management. Figure 1: Differentiates technology domain service-level reporting metrics and customer experience or application service-level reporting metric perspectives Business service management best practices generally include the creation of service-level agreements between IT and the business stakeholder or customer. Significant transformative activities involving people, process and technology are required by IT to transition from technology domain management to the management of discrete business functions and services. Technology monitoring and management automation play a critical role in enabling and achieving BSM objectives. End-to-end or holistic visibility of application availability and performance is a critical capability for enabling IT to transition to business service management. Existing technology domain-specific automation capabilities (monitoring, management and diagnostics) remain critical to BSM. Ultimately, an integrated ecosystem comprised of existing domain-automation tools and holistic application-availability and performance-management automation solutions is needed to achieve best practice BSM objectives. 2 of 9
Business service management transition IT organizations transitioning to best practice BSM are tasked with leveraging, reconfiguring and supplementing existing automation investments to achieve BSM goals. Managing applications holistically with traditional technology domain and overarching manager-of-manager tools is difficult, if not impossible, without supplemental automation capability and improved full lifecycle-process discipline. Orderly transition of automation to BSM objectives requires IT to document its current automation architecture, define the future-state architecture, perform a gap analysis, select supplemental solutions and implement projects that achieve the new automation architecture. One or more of the automation transition projects will need to generate a quick win so that the IT team can demonstrate application and service-management capability progress to justify continued investment. Network-resident application performance-management appliances deliver proven quick win or rapid time to value for holistic application and business service management capabilities. These network-centric solutions address the immediate challenge of quick starting BSM automation, and they easily integrate into the longer-term strategic ecosystem architecture. Figure 2: Identifies the monitoring functions, processes and technology domains that are addressed, supported and enhanced by Visual solutions. Application availability and performance Applications are the lifeblood of business. Underlying network infrastructure is the circulatory system that delivers that lifeblood. Business service management success is contingent upon well-designed, implemented and managed applications and supporting infrastructures. Customer relationship management (CRM), sales force automation (SFA), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and electronic health record (EHR), patient data record (PDR) and other applications are fundamental to daily business operations. Application disruptions have significant and tangible costs. Service availability and management of these critical applications has become a key business metric garnering executive attention and requiring cross-functional alignment and management. 3 of 9
Figure 3: Today's applications often run on networks and a host of other interrelated infrastructure components that are complex and constantly changing. Ensuring the availability of a single infrastructure component such as a server is not sufficient to satisfy business service management requirements Threats to application availability and performance come from many potential underlying causes. Examples of these underlying causes include: changes to the infrastructure or applications, security breaches, the implementation of new applications, and component error within the deployed application or infrastructure. Responsibility for ensuring application availability is shared across multiple disciplines within IT. These cross-functional teams need an automation tool that provides proactive identification and automated probable cause analysis of service deviations or disruptions. Holistic application availability and performance management can be difficult challenges when IT personnel lack enterprisewide visibility of applications and their underlying infrastructure components. Ensuring application availability depends on the ability to dynamically discover applications, users and underlying interdependent infrastructure components, and visualize those applications in the context of business services. Comprehensive network-centric application visibility and monitoring capability is largely missing from traditional business service management tools. Without this critical capability it's easy to see why so many organizations are consuming manpower during incident events. Limited visibility technology domain-based automation leads to extended service disruptions. In this operating model, significant sweat equity is invested to resource a cross-functional team of technology domain subject matter experts during each incident. Additionally, management staff is consumed to orchestrate situation coordination, drive the team to determine probable cause and resolve the incident by restoring service. 4 of 9
APM alignment to IT best practices Deployment of data center resident application performance management (APM) appliances provides holistic transactional visibility to business-critical applications. APM information combined with network flow information provides end-to-end transaction visibility, including the network components traversed. APM appliance solutions passively monitor application transactions as they occur. These appliances differentiate between and report response time for user, network and application tiers. Transaction details and summary information are stored in the appliance database. Detail and summary information is leveraged for troubleshooting, baselining, error detection, performance and availability analysis, trend reporting, and many other functions. APM aligns with supports and optimizes many BSM best practice disciplines. Examples of the BSM disciplines and a description of the supporting APM functionality, include: Qualitative Assessment Event Management Quantitative Assessment Availability and performance alerts and events are issued Performance deviation-based events are issued Alerting classification by application, group and location Incident Management Engineer in a box that monitors application transactions Detects deviations from baseline, provides alerting Provides probable cause, reducing mean time to resolve Ability to verify resolution or fix results Availability Management Application availability service-level reporting Trend reporting by application, user group and location Analysis to support process and application improvement Performance Management Application performance service-level reporting Trend reporting by application, user group and location Analysis to support process and application improvement Problem Management Provides automated probable cause analysis Stores application transaction information for forensic root cause tasks and historical reporting Capacity Management Provides application-specific utilization trending Pre- and post-application release utilization analysis Supports network capacity planning (add network flow) Change Management Pre- and post-application release utilization analysis Identifies users and applications potentially impacted by planned changes Detects and alerts to new traffic patterns within the infrastructure Service Level Management Availability and performance information support design improvements Continuity Management Provides autodiscovered application interdependencies 5 of 9
Visual application performance management Network-based APM systems have emerged as an important advancement in IT business service management. They provide complete, enterprise visibility of network, application and service usage. APM solutions identify deviations, errors and disruptions that impact services. APM solutions accelerate achievement of IT business service management. Brief overview of network-based APM Network-based APM solutions improve application availability and performance through functionality that includes: Real-time application discovery Application profiling and baselining Behavior and policy monitoring Isolation of applications/systems/users that are affecting application availability Probable cause analysis to accelerate availability issue resolution APM solutions support best practices that enable IT organizations to continually improve availability and performance of business-critical applications. Visual TruView demonstrates value in a multitude of business technology scenarios. The following paragraphs highlight several of those scenarios or use cases. Deploy Deployment of new applications and WAN services can be challenging in today's complex network environments. Some of the most challenging aspects of change lie in data center consolidation, MPLS WAN migration and implementation of voice over IP. Inability to baseline application and underlying infrastructure performance across the distributed enterprise severely limits preand post-change analysis capabilities. Pre- and post-change measurement and comparison capability is needed to identify, quantify and resolve change related performance issues. Visual TruView meets the following business needs: Validate network readiness Reduce impact by quantifying actual bandwidth requirements Compare current application performance to historical Validate and maximize class of service configuration Monitor bandwidth allocation and protocol makeup for all traffic Measure "new" application utilization and more accurately estimate production impact during development and testing Ensure delivery of VoIP services with quality metrics for every link and call-by-call details Visual TruView application-performance dashboard allows you to quickly see the worst-performing applications, servers and sites without a single mouse click 6 of 9
Manage There are two types of situations that organizations must be prepared to manage: planned changes and unexpected events. Each has its own unique challenges, and IT organizations should have a comprehensive management strategy in place. Effective strategy for managing planned change includes the ability to establish a performance baseline. The prechange baseline allows IT to measure the impact on performance and end-user experience after a change. Effective strategy for managing unexpected events should include the ability to see throughout the distributed enterprise. The supporting management solution should provide rapid in-depth analysis that isolates the error condition within an application, system or network. The solution should provide a single point of reference that all stakeholders within IT can reference. The single reference allows disparate teams to collaborate and come to faster incident resolution. Visual TruView addresses the following business needs: Validate the impact of change (network and application) Leverage multiple sources of information under a single pane of glass Immediately identify the affected resources (application, server or network) Understand current performance in context of historical baselines Visualize trending for performance degradation Report on bandwidth allocation and application growth Cisco WAAS Aware reports quickly show response-time measurements 7 of 9
Solve One important element of an effective management strategy is being able to quickly identify error conditions down to the source technology-domain component. Accomplishing this task requires a solution that is not limited in visibility to one technology domain. The solution must see the application path across the enterprise, understand the component interrelationships and identify the error causing source. Visual TruView is a robust unified solution that utilizes various data sets such as packet, transaction IPFIX (NetFlow) and SNMP all within a single integrated appliance. Most importantly, the reporting is rolled up into a centralized view with easy to understand charts and graphs. These views are tailored to individual user reporting requirements. Problem domain isolation is simplified and the cause of a performance or availability issue is quickly pinpointed. Mean time to resolution (MTTR) durations decrease and end-user quality of experience (QoE) improves. The following business needs are addressed: Display real-time network, application, and server performance Understand the severity and impact of incidents and error conditions View and report on every conversation, host and protocol traversing the network Identify users, sites and applications affected by a slowdown or outage Isolate specific network, data link and physical layer issues on critical WAN links Consolidate and leverage troubleshooting information Fast problem resolution with visibility into business critical multi-tier applications with time-correlated backend transactions 8 of 9
Optimize The proliferation of converged voice, video and data networks creates some unique challenges for IT organizations as they align with corporate business objectives to meet end-user QoE requirements. The proliferation of converged voice, video and data networks creates some unique challenges for IT organizations as they align with corporate business objectives to meet end-user quality of experience requirements. An effective QoE management strategy begins with the ability to monitor critical applications across distributed enterprises with end-to-end visibility. In order to effectively take control of these converged environments, IT organizations must have broad visibility and indepth analysis capabilities that show how one service is affecting another service. Visual TruView provides the following business benefits: Merge and leverage data sets from different analysis sources (NetFlow, SNMP, probe-based stats, application performance-management appliances, etc.) Customized application growth reports Centralized Web access Ability to consolidate and leverage troubleshooting information Visual TruView can measure metrics for VoIP calls Conclusion Visual TruView is a tightly integrated single appliance solution that provides network-based, comprehensive application availability and performance management. For more information on Visual TruView application performance solutions, visit www.flukenetworks.com/truview. Fluke Networks operates in more than 50 countries worldwide. To find your local office contact details, go to www.flukenetworks.com/contact. 2015 Fluke Corporation. Rev: 03/20/2014 9:51 am (Literature Id: 3473693) 9 of 9