A Secure-24 Business White Paper August 2015 Application Performance Management Secure-24 Application Performance Management as a Service Business Performance Equals Application Performance
Executive Overview Enterprise applications require high scalability and optimal performance to exceed customer expectations. The top issues faced by IT Teams in enterprises are monitoring uptime and ensuring optimal business application performance. To resolve these issues, enterprises must invest in end-toend application performance management services that empower IT application delivery and operations teams to deliver business applications to meet customer expectation. Application Performance Management (APM) is the monitoring and management of performance and availability of software applications. APM solutions proactively detect and diagnose application performance issues before they become mission critical to maintain expected levels of service. This business white paper discusses Application Performance Management in depth including current market trends and business challenges. It also presents Secure-24 Application Management as a Services (APMaaS) as a complete application management solution.
Table of Contents Introduction: Market Trends 2 Business Challenges 3 Secure-24 Application Management Approach 5 Key Features 6 Key Business Benefits 6 Business Data 6 Monitoring Application Data 7 Reducing Sensitive Data Exposure In Applications 7 Limiting Sensitive Data Exposure When Sharing Data 7 Conclusion 8 1 APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT WHITE PAPER
Introduction: Market Trends Increasingly, business performance equals application performance. Users relay on applications to reach customers, build products, automate business processes, and perform almost every other business critical task. For IT organizations, application performance and availability are the most visible indicators of 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 monitoring and management rather than to 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 increasing 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 application infrastructure. These are the market trends facing enterprises in IT operations, application support, line of business developers and operations and network management. Application Complexity Today s enterprise applications are complex as noted in Figure 1. The complexity of applications infrastructures result in the following issues faced by operations teams, who must deliver optimal applications delivery to meet customer expectations: Lack of appropriate expertise and resources Inability to understand the real impact of application downtime Shifting of responsibility among various technology teams Lack of Actionable Data even with so many monitoring tools Increased time to identify the root cause of issues The complexity of application delivery requires performance management services that span an enterprise of physical to virtual, on-premise to cloud or hosted platforms. 2 APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT WHITE PAPER
Figure 1. Complex Applications Model Business 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 can 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 contact the help desk. The inability to perform when the application is down is not the type of spotlight application and IT teams desire, 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 continually block IT from focusing on adding new business value. 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 end-users. IT teams must detect problems more proactively, so that they are working on isolating and fixing the problem, well before business is impacted. Proactively ensuring data center migrations, consolidation, expanded deployments, new releases and new users are protected from application performance issues. 3 APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT WHITE PAPER
When businesses virtualize, consolidate or migrate data centers to the cloud, they expect to improve flexibility, cost, and control, but do not expect to negatively impact application performance. When deploying new applications or expanding existing deployments, it is critical to ensure that the optimal performance organizations require are 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 encountering unforeseen performance problems. Executive and 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 the world of heightened application focus, that IT is able to communicate broadly and in languages tailored to technical and business audiences about application performance. Summary The bottom line is that application performance equals 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 occurring with application performance. This current state of application performance management results in significant negative impact to business via: Revenue loss Reputation loss Productivity loss Quality loss Figure 2: Troubleshooting Work Flow 4 APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT WHITE PAPER
Secure-24 s Performance Management Approach Today s complex application infrastructure requires a performance management solution across all critical parts of the application delivery chain. Whether organizations 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 and 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, IT teams must be able to monitor and troubleshoot the ultimate measure of application performance: the end-user s experience. Transaction Tracing and 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 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. Figure 3: Secure-24 APMaaS Work Flow This level of visibility and automation routinely outstrips an organizations IT skill set and labor pool. Teams are built to support the planning, building and running of applications with little resources 5 APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT WHITE PAPER
available for managing performance and troubleshooting issues. Secure-24 Application Performance Management as s Service (APMaaS) is designed specifically to support applications and ensure critical business data is always available and optimized to meet business demands. APMaaS enables businesses to: Monitor using real user data during actual business hours to gain a baseline of what is normal versus abnormal. Spot trends, set sensitivity based on importance to business and alert in advance of outages that impact revenues and reputations. Monitor and collect data on every user accessing every application all of the time. Diagnose the problem quickly by combining multiple data sources into a single record designed to isolate who is responsible for fixing the issue. The majority of troubleshooting time is spent with IT groups in War Rooms defending their data and positioning that the problem is not their responsibility to solve. By viewing the application from end to end, finger pointing is eliminated with greater time spent on solving the problem. Fix the problem quicker with the availability of data to support the root cause. The days of trial and error to determine the required action to restore business back to optimized levels no longer exist. Use the baselines to test the fix prior to moving to production, eliminating costly mistakes and inefficient back out plans. Figure 4. Secure-24 APMaaS Model Secure-24 APMaaS is uniquely positioned to offer these key features and business benefits. Key Benefits Automates setup, delivery and on-going maintenance of Performance Management requirements. Secure-24 is the easy button. Built on network and application performance management software from Riverbed technologies, the leader in Application Performance. Using Secure-24 experts for application performance monitoring frees up staff to focus on core business development activities. 15+ year proven track record of providing managed services to enterprises worldwide. 6 APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT WHITE PAPER
Secure-24 ensures delivery of clients most critical business data 24x7x365 In-depth experience supporting the industry s most critical applications: SAP including HANA, Oracle (JD Edwards, Hyperion, PeopleSoft and E-Business Suite), QAD, SharePoint and others Flexible deployment options: on premise or hosted solutions CapEx or OpEx options Automates setup, delivery and ongoing maintenance of Performance Management requirements. Secure-24 is the easy button. Business Benefits Impact to Revenue - Focus your staff on projects designed to grow the business Impact to Costs - Transform large capital expenses into a predictable, monthly operating expense Impact to Reputation - Using Secure-24 s specialized staff and processes ensures your business remains optimized for your users Impact to Quality - Industry- leading SLAs deliver the confidence that the business is running at the desired state all the time Business Data When considering an Application Performance Management services, businesses must consider: Where is the data located? How is the data viewed? How is data used? Where are users located? How do users access data? Is data accessible via any device? How is relocated, tested or corrected? How is data monitored? What are troubleshooting methods? How are risk and success factors measured? APMaaS is one component of Secure-24 s Performance and Optimization Practice offering managed services designed to increase visibility, optimization and control of business critical data. Figure 5. Performance and Optimization 7 APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT WHITE PAPER
Conclusion Application Performance Management enables enterprises to deliver the right application user experience by proactively monitoring the network and applications infrastructure. Secure-24 APMaaS, provides comprehensive monitoring across the entire network, including all critical business applications. while reducing problem isolation demands on IT teams and increasing business performance. Expect faster applications, real-time diagnostics, optimal performance and the elimination of shelf ware, while reducing problem isolation demands on IT teams and increasing business performance. Learn more at Http://www.secure-24.com 8 APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT WHITE PAPER
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