White Paper Application Performance Enhancement. Product & Solution Application Management & Modernization.
Content. 1. Understanding Performance Enhancement. 5 2. Exploring Performance Enhancement. 6 2.1 APE Use-Cases. 6 2.2 APE value proposition. 6 3. Implementing APE in your organization. 8 3.1 Selecting and using the right APE tools. 8 3.2 Creating APE reports for all stakeholders. 8 4. Additional Information. 9 5. Literature. 11
1. Understanding Performance Enhancement. 4 5 According to a study by Gartner, in 2011, about $2 billion were spent worldwide on application performance monitoring licenses and first-year maintenance contracts. This is a 15% increase over the $1.7 billion spent on Application Performance Management in 2010. IT and business services have grown exponentially in size, diversity, and complexity over the past few years. With the advent of new technologies and architectures, the abstraction of IT complexity has become a major challenge for IT service providers trying to guarantee high quality of their services. 57% of mobile web users had problem in the past year when accessing a website and 47% had a problem accessing an app on their phone (Compuware, 2011). Nowadays, business critical applications must not just be available 24x7, but they must perform optimally at all times for all users. Applications no longer reside in one location and it s not entirely possible to know precisely which set of components the applications are relying upon. The lack of transparency for business transactions and services not only affects the quality of service for the customer but also affects effective utilization of internal resources for the service provider. Application Performance Enhancement (APE) solutions safeguard high application availability by enabling performance monitoring, pro-active failure resolution and optimize resource usage during service management. APE as application analyzer and troubleshooter To achieve the needed quality of service, IT infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals monitor the weakest links in the delivery chain. Over time, the focal point has moved from networks to systems to application code. APE is not only responsible for uninterrupted smooth service and high availability but also supports application assessment and debugging. With different APE solutions available, blind spots in an application can be made transparent and applicationdependencies can be identified. In addition, these solutions enable root-cause analysis to isolate the erroneous source code responsible for a particular failure increasing the efficiency of service management.
2. Exploring Performance Enhancement. The success of an individual company today is measured in terms of the performance and availability of its business services and its underlined IT infrastructure. Business services and IT infrastructure have grown exponentially in size, diversity, and complexity over the past few years. The complexity of several transactional business services has reached a point where the diversity of issues generated from multiple dependencies is way beyond what team skills and cooperation can handle. The difficulty of resolving issues in transactions and applications directly affects the quality of service and the enterprise s overall productivity and revenue. It also contributes to a significant amount of unplanned work for many IT resources, which affects IT operational costs. 2.1 APE Use-Cases Currently, companies face a host of challenges to define service levels in their Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in terms of standard metrics and also find ways of complying with them. They are focusing on to find a solution to define parameters and measure service availability and performance monitoring of their respective systems. The business challenges faced by different service companies can be summed up as: 2.2 APE value proposition APE is no longer limited to server or network monitoring within the enterprise. The end-user experience has now become a critical part of the discipline. The performance of a business process depends on the efficiency of the complex ICT landscape across all layers needing an E2E monitoring from the datacenter until the end user (Figure 1). With these solutions, a transaction can be traced right from its origin and an error can be spotted either on the user-side (UIs, ISPs), in the network (Application Servers, Web Servers) or in the data centers. APE solutions provide organizations with a strong basis to set up and measure E2E application performance in terms of specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).Using these KPIs, application owners can rate the performance of their respective networks/applications and find out how well their current service levels stack against the ones mentioned in the SLAs. APE solutions enable the generation of KPIs such as number of errors encountered during a particular timeframe and number of business users affected by a failure. Draft an End-To-End(E2E) service monitoring methodology. Optimize application performance across the network to reduce risk of downtime and proactively identify performance impacts. Capture real-time visibility into network performance to quickly determine the issues impacting the network. Baseline network performance and perform trend analysis to detect network outages in advance. Devise a mathematical model that describes end-to-end availability based on the availability of single components (e.g. network, applications), so that root causes and bottle necks can be identified. Formulate application and network availability KPIs which can be used to track server response time, network bandwidth, latency and user experience in a distributed environment. Identify appropriate application and network monitoring tools which can be used to generate performance monitoring reports, business dashboards and enable regular measurement of the selected KPIs.
6 7 E2E Application Monitoring. B2C Customer Business Application HQ Employee User Interface Datacenter Mobile Sales Network Supplier,... Fig. 1. Other significant benefits, are the cost savings which arise from: Application analysis during the due diligence phase leading to more realistic effort estimations. Reduction in ticket- resolution times, decreasing the number of resources needed for incident and problem management per year. Reduction in the overall no. of incidents and problems per year, saving the effort spent during 1st, 2nd and 3rd level support in service operations. Reduction in SLA penalties which service providers have to pay in case of availability levels do not meet the agreed levels in SLAs. Increase in quality of service and end-user satisfaction since the impact of failures and glitches in systems can be analyzed in terms of the number of users affected.
3. Implementing APE in your organization. Before embarking on the installation and usage of APE solutions, it s important to understand the different type of tools currently available in the market. 3.1 Selecting and using the right APE tools The different APE tools can be classified into three primary categories: 1. Component-centric: These are the set of tools which can be customized and used for monitoring the performance of individual components in the network. These tools are primarily used for collecting performance indicators such as hard disk size, CPU usage and server status. Products such as Nagios and Big Brother are classified in this category. 2. Application-centric: These set of tools is used for performance monitoring of different applications and also for application analysis and debugging. These set of tools allow the application owners to deep-dive into application code by performing end to end transaction diagnostics. In this category, there are tools such as dynatrace from Compuware, IBM Tivoli and BMC Patrol. 3. Network-centric: These set of tools primarily focus on network monitoring, business-service and end-user experience management. These tools monitor the complete network landscape and provide an overview of the health of a particular service/network using dashboards. Tools such as Compuware Gomez and OpenNMS are classified in this category. 3.2 Creating APE reports for all stakeholders Today, IT managers and their business counterparts need to be aligned as well as have a good understanding of who owns the service, how the service is delivered, how data security can be ensured and SLAs are being met. Thus, it is important to have solutions capable of creating role-relevant reports (Figure 2) that can be used by all the stakeholders involved in service delivery. When IT department is able to share information across the entire organization, all teams can collaborate effectively. Without achieving this level of business IT transparency and alignment, businesses aspiring to quickly grow revenue, customer base or brand recognition face hindrances. Role-relevant reporting. Relevant data Visualization Executive Service management IT Operations Troubleshooting Service quality status Cost of poor quality/users impacted % SLAs and % OLAs adhered to Application downtime SLA risks User availability/downtime Quality of Service Correlation of end-user experience with network KPIs Percentage of slow transactions Percentage of users affected Fig. 2.
4. Additional Information. 8 9 Application Performance Enhancement is an integral part of T-Systems Application Management and Modernization (AMM) portfolio. T-Systems has a standard methodology for implementing APE projects which spans over four different phases (Figure 3). During the first phase, the system characteristics are documented and application perfor- mance requirements are collected. Based on this information, optimal application metrics(kpis) are identified in the next phase. Thereafter, application availability is measured using appropriate tools and current application performance is baselined. Before, drafting the identified KPIs in SLAs or OLAs. APE Methodology. Document current system overview Availability metrics (KPIs) and calculation mechanisms Measuring, reporting and outage analysis Review results and baseline Fig. 3. T-Systems is Deutsche Telekom s corporate customer arm. Using a global infrastructure of data centers and networks, T-Systems operates information and communication technology (ICT) systems for multinational corporations and public sector institutions. With offices in over 20 countries and global delivery capabilities, T-Systems serves companies in all industries from the automotive industry to telecommunications, the financial sector, retail, services, media, energy, and the manufacturing industry all the way to government agencies and the healthcare sector. Approximately 48,200 employees worldwide use their industry expertise and ICT know-how to provide topquality service. T-Systems generated revenue of around EUR 9.2 billion in the 2011 financial year.
5. Literature. Source Document [Gartner, 2011] Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring (APM). [Globe Newswire, New Survey] What users want from mobile, Compuware Corporation, July, 2011. [Garbani, Jean-Pierre] Market Overview: Application Performance Management, Q4 2011, Forrester, 2011. [Garbani, Jean-Pierre, Hubbert, Evelyn, Competitive Analysis: Application Performance Management and Business Nelson, E Lauren] Transaction Monitoring, Q4 2011, Forrester, 2011. [Singh, Chandranshu, Azoff, Micahel] Technology Audit Compuware Vantage and Gomez APM, Ovum, 2010. Fig.-Nr. Figure Name Figure 1: Figure 2: Figure 3: E2E Application Monitoring. Role-relevant reporting. APM Methodology.
About the Expert Ankit Gupta is a project manager within the Global Competence Center (GCC) for Application Management & Modernization (AMM). He is part of the AMM Advisory practice and provides consulting for topics such as IT-Strategy, sourcing, operational excellence besides managing global application migration projects. His experience includes, offshore coordination and program management for service management and legacy modernization projects with revenues between 3-5 million and team size between 30-50 members. He also has been driving the legacy modernization and Application Performance Management (APM) initiatives within the GCC s modernization program. In the last nine months, he has provided technical consulting in modernization topics for multiple RFIs, RFPs and implemented performance solutions for numerous customer service projects. The GCC AMM is a multinational team of more than 30 consultants and project managers who specialize in the implementation of critical application outsourcing projects. Big AMM deals are accompanied from Lead to FMO above all branches, technologies and countries. This Expert Paper is published within the Experts on Application Management & Modernization column. For more information go to: www.t-systems.com
Published by: T-Systems International GmbH Hahnstrasse 43d D - 60325 Frankfurt Responsible for content: Product Marketing http://www.t-systems.de APE October 2012 RecySatin, halbmatt gestrichen weiß Bilderdruck, mindestens aus 80 % Sekundärfasern, Rest aus holzfreien Primärfasern. Contact: T-Systems International GmbH Holger Wächtershäuser Market Intelligence Hahnstraße 43d 60528 Frankfurt am Main Holger.Waechtershaeuser@t-systems.com T-Systems International GmbH Günter Hüttig ICT Solution Marketing Otto-Röhm-Straße 71c 64293 Darmstadt Guenter.Huettig@t-systems.com T-Systems International GmbH Ankit Gupta Global Competence Center Application Management & Modernization Fasanenweg 5 70771 Leinfelden-Echterdingen amm.coe@t-systems.com