Netis White Paper 2013.10 CrossFlow BPC Application Performance Management Based on Network Data Visualize end-to-end Service Transaction Performance By Network Data Application performance management is crucial in business operation. Traditional application management is limited by technology. For example, Silo data analysis way lacks correlation and is redundant and inefficient; Agent mode affects system performance; some others cost too much time to develop and carry out and so on. An application performance management platform using network data solves the problem properly. Real- time monitoring, correlative analysis, low cost, and high usability make this platform superior than any other, creating fruitful benefits to IT department. Discover IT, Value IT, Love IT.
Content DEMANDS OF APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT... 3 PROBLEMS AND CHALLENGES OF APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT... 5! ISOLATED SYSTEMS, DIFFERENT FORMATS, DISCRETE DATA, LACK OF CORRELATION... 5! AGENT RESTRAINS THE PERFORMANCE OF MANAGED SYSTEM, EVEN MAKES SYSTEM DOWN, AND SERIOUSLY AFFECTS BUSINESS OPERATION, THUS LACKS REAL- TIME PROPERTY.... 5! MONITORING SYSTEM REQUIRES SPECIAL DEVELOPING; COMPOSITE APPLICATIONS OF MULTI- TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATION LEAD TO LONG DEVELOPMENT CYCLE, DIFFICULT TO CONSTRUCT AND HIGH MAINTENANCE COST.... 5 APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT BASED ON NETWORK DATA RESOURCES... 7! ABUNDANT NETWORK DATA RESOURCES... 7! MATURE COLLECTING DEVICE AND TECHNOLOGY... 7! MECHANISM AND FUNCTIONS OF MONITORING PLATFORM... 8 TECHNICAL ADVANTAGES OF APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT BASED ON NETWORK DATA RESOURCE 10! NO RISK, HIGH USABILITY, RELIABLE IMPLEMENTATION... 10! PROVIDE REAL- TIME AND ACCURATE DATA... 10! CORRELATIVE ANALYSIS OF TRANSACTION TRACKING... 10! CONFIGURABLE SOLUTION LOWERS DEVELOPING COST... 11 2
Demands of Application Performance Management Application performance management is very important in business operation. Acquisition of measurable application performance data initiates event management, fault management, and problem management; it also provides data and supports for aftermath analysis, tracking, and locating. Obtaining valid data of application performance management can help IT department understand the operation status of business application system. The exceptional fluctuation can be detected and solved at the early stage, as well avoided to expand and cause further business loss. When problems occur, IT department is able to quickly analyze, track, and locate fault, and reduce interruption to business so that the goal of SLA is accomplished. Application performance management stresses not only on the silo solution that aims at one or few certain technical levels, but also on the performance management of system as a whole. As a result, from indicators to covering scope, application performance management platform should have the following capabilities:! Focus on Transaction Performance Indicators: application performance management should focus on 4 key indicators of application transaction status, including transaction volume, success rate, response time, and return code.! End-to-End Monitoring: multi-tier application components are connected to construct service path. The application performance delivered by service path forms user experience. Application performance management should cover service path from end to end and provides accurate performance assessment and location information. Regarding response time of ultimate user as the major reference, the platform can locate problem on a component level in time; after problem solved, the platform should also be able to evaluate the performance after improvement regarding response time.! Transaction Tracking and Correlative Analysis: application performance management should preserve original transaction records. It should provide tracking and analysis of a specific transaction; be able to correlate multi-tier application components to achieve fast and in-depth problem analysis and locating.! Real-Time property: real-time data guarantees the timeliness of O&M. Acquiring real-time data of application performance and providing statistics of essential indicators facilitate IT department to understand, analyze and track dynamic changes to application performance so that they can promptly find and solve Problems.! Fast execution, Reliable initiation: fast execution and reliable initiation are required for solutions to adapt to expanding business needs and fast developing composite application architecture in order to support constant needs for performance management. 3
! Multiple Data Centers: enterprises often deploy two centers or more in order to establish redundant backup for more reliability. Once a fault causes applications to switch between datacenters, data flow changes direction. Application performance management should cover multiple centers and detect the direction change of data flow as well its impact on application performance. LearnAboutUser experience LearnAboutFinalDelivery Status LearnAboutInfluenceof ApplicationonBusiness CoverEnd-to-End ApplicationPaths MonitorQualityof ApplicationService RapidDiagnosisand ProblemLocating EstablishMonitoringGraph ofapplicationservice FocusonPerformanceof ApplicationTransaction Multi-Step,Multi-TierData CorrelativeDiagnosis Client Network Application Service App App User WA Switc FW LB Web Server Middle Ware App DB App App 4
Problems and Challenges of Application Performance Management! Isolated Systems, Different Formats, Discrete Data, Lack of Correlation Monitored Data Sources are complex and come from different applications, servers, and many infrastructures. They differ quite much and difficult to be managed. Once problems occur, infrastructures, mediate components, databases and applications have to been searched independently. They are relatively isolated from each other. So it s hard to find out what and where the problem is. Meanwhile, there is no effective way to correlative and analyze transaction process, operation process in terms of a single user or transaction, which make it even harder to find out the problem. A lot of time is spent in looking for the problem in troubleshooting. Once problem occurred, relating departments make separate diagnosis in terms of their own experience at the same time. They lack evidence in consensus view and no entry point to reach an agreement, which make them have to investigate again and again.! Agent restrains the performance of managed system, even makes system down, and seriously affects business operation, thus lacks real-time property. Agent is a traditional way to manage application performance. Agent is deployed in the controlled system and applications to collect data for track and analysis. However, agent directly interacts with the controlled system and applications, whose resources are consumed in collecting data. That would degrade system performance and even interrupt business operation. As a result, Agent is seldom used for real-time monitoring in heavily loaded system in order to avoid performance decline.! Monitoring system requires special developing; composite applications of multi-technology integration lead to long development cycle, difficult to construct and high maintenance cost. Since system and applications use different technologies in composite application architecture, various business segments use different types of agents to collect data and deal with complicated log formats. Traditional monitoring system has to be continuously upgraded to accomplish satisfying performance management. As the scale of IT keeps expanding, requirement of business 5
maintenance becomes harsher, workload of application performance management surges, long developing cycle and difficult initiation cause high maintenance cost and human cost of IT department. 6
Resources Application performance management based on network data source solves all the problems. Real-time monitoring, correlative structure, low cost, and high usability are technical advantages of this platform that bring tremendous benefits to IT department. Application performance management focuses on the entire system, not only the silo style solution that only concentrates on a certain technological level. As a result, from indicators to covering range, application performance management should have the following capabilities:! Abundant Network Data Resources In SOA architecture, the levels of application services are divided distinctly. Transactions between different levels are transferred by network. Infrastructures and applications are all oriented by service to provide services for applications; collecting devices can easily obtain network data of key transaction segments. Acquisition of network data becomes so much convenient and flexible. There are mainly two ways of obtaining network data: The first way is to use specialized traffic mirroring device, such as TAP Switch. Such devices provide data sources excellent organizing functions for backend data analysis, including basic functions such as filtering, converging, sorting, data packet delivering; advanced functions such as packet cropping, loading/unloading tabs; and put data packets accurately in order. Traffic mirroring has great advantage on obtaining data and reducing power consumption of data processing. The other way is Switch Port Analyzer (SPAN). SPAN oriented from Cisco has been widely applied in many network products from like Cisco, Huawei for its mature and stable data acquisition technology.! Mature collecting device and technology There is also mature data collecting device. For example, NetScout InfinisStream traffic probe has high-performance data collecting and saving capacities. Visualized network traffic makes application organizing much easier. Also, standard data export port can be directly used by upper-level monitoring platform to obtain target data through the port. Time Stamp and Synchronous technology are also the advantages of this kind of devices, which can provide accurate data source for 7
upper-level analytic platform.! Mechanism and functions of monitoring platform Upper-level application performance management platform fully uses network data to help IT department construct application performance management platform with protocol decoding technology. Protocol decoding is the basis of upper-level analytic platform. All the indicators of application performance analyzing come from protocol decoding. SOAP has become the mainstream technology in SOA. These standard protocols bring many advantages to protocol decoding and make decoder applied to any SOAP protocol decoding. In different application environments, decoding fields can be easily configured and changed, which avoid developing new decoders repeatedly. In other words, protocol decoding can be widely applied to SOA. In upper-level, business logic and service path can be configured in visualized interface; build application components archive that facilitates combination of application components and construction of service path view. The essence of application performance management is service-oriented monitoring and management. Service path view presents key indicators, provides navigation during data analysis, discovers and locates problems. Transaction-centric indicator analysis provides 5 essential indicators---transaction volume, success rate, response time, and return code, and distinguishes transaction type, sub-transaction type, and transaction channel. It covers application service component from port to port, and visualizes the performance and usability of performance. Return code of application layer is also an important indicator of application performance management. Monitoring return codes from different layers can bring diverse benefits for managers. For example, if 5XX type error is found in the return code of Web Service, then there is a fault in Web Service; error code in business layer can reveal faults in business and transaction processing. You can obtain basic performance information and deep application interaction information by protocol decoding. Event tracking function supports searching through time, IP, transaction type, transaction result, and other basic information; it also supports searching by combination of multiple fields in application protocol. Maintenance staffs and experts are as well equipped with transaction tracking port and deep analyzer. Field in protocols from multiple application layers is automatically correlated, which also correlates application components from each layer in service path; IT department can therefore able to quickly find and locate problems with port-to-port transaction tracking. Distributed architecture supports multi-center application deployment. Enterprises usually build 8
multi- datacenter; application architecture also adopts load sharing or master-dummy mode. In this way, monitoring management has to cover multiple datacenters. Distributed architecture can be supportive in this scenario. Processing devices are deployed in each datacenter; they grab, analyze, and save data locally and send result of analysis to management interface for user altogether. This way of deployment can dramatically reduce bandwidth usage without affecting platform performance. Business Application Protocol Application Protocol Network Service Based on Network Service Directly Provides One-to-One Service to Business Provides Transaction Channel Between Application Systems Results of Application Interaction Reflect Transaction Performance 9
Technical Advantages of Application Performance Management Based On Network Data Resource! No Risk, High Usability, Reliable Implementation Bypass monitoring mode doesn t affect application performance, which avoids risk of performance degradation and system crash, and provides real-time statistics of application performance data for IT department. Protocol decoding and application services definitions are easily configured without any repeated developing. As a result, BPC platform can operate flexibly and implement quickly. Based on both advantages above, BPC specialized service covers application organizing, protocol decoding, and application deployment that ensure a safe and sound implementation.! Provide Real-time And Accurate Data Business security is highly promised by timely troubleshooting. IT department needs to solve problems in shortest time. Enterprise has strict rules on the time window of IT O&M. Application performance analyzed by network data is benefited from bypass monitoring mode. Network data is generated in real-time business operation; in other words, business operation itself is a real-time data source. Monitoring gates of every transaction component can directly present the most accurate transaction status data with high-precision time-stamping technology from bypass data collecting devices.! Correlative Analysis of Transaction Tracking Service path is the core of application performance management. It not only directly presents port-to-port logic of application components, but also correlates the transactions of these components. Service path provides two advantages for application performance management: first, essential performance indicators are organized according to business logic; chain reaction caused by problems can be easily discovered from indicators of component layers. Second, there are usually correlative fields in protocols as for transactions from different levels. When analyzing a transaction, components related can be correlated and analyzed together, which ensures application performance management has the ability to accurately analyze transaction performance of different application components. Correlative analysis provides direct and effective reasoning in problem locating. 10
! Configurable Solution Lowers Developing Cost Making protocol decoding and service definition configurable are the best choice for network-data-based application performance management. They have loose-coupled feature and can be widely applied in SOA application performance management. Different from traditional independent systems that have to deal with redundant data, the new architecture obtains target data from uniform network protocol. With configurable service definition, the architecture is the most efficient, flexible, and personalized way to adapt to varying needs of application performance management. No more long cycle developing is necessary. The overall costs of time, human force and capital are reduced. 11
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