TradeTech Architecture 2011 - Rodney Morrison, How to Achieve Success with Application Performance Monitoring Initiatives

How to Achieve Success With
Application Performance Monitoring Initiatives

Rodney Morrison
VP, Products
SL Corporation

Agenda

 Definition and Objectives of APM
 Analyst Breakdown of the APM Solution Space
 Challenges to Success
 Coming Advancements in APM
 An Investment Bank Use Case

What is APM?

 APM refers to the discipline within systems
management that focuses on monitoring and
managing the performance and service
availability of software applications.

 The two main sources of information for proper
application management are resources and user
experience.

Factors Driving APM Initiatives

 Complexity of applications increasing dramatically
 Cost estimations of application downtimes are
more frequently calculated and on the rise
 High severity incidents on the rise
 MTTR is often 30 minutes to 3 hours in even the
most critical application areas

The Perfect Storm
 Best practices for change control have created
operational silos
 Events geared more for operational management
are passed to application support teams from all
silos
 Each technology stack requires expertise and
training in administrative and monitoring tools

Result
 High level of noisy, uncorrelated events make
proactive application management impossible
 Lack of centralized access to data and
performance history leads to lengthy triage for
resolution

APM Breakdown – The Analyst’s Vision

 End-user experience monitoring
 Runtime architecture discovery
 Transaction monitoring
 Component deep-dive monitoring
 Performance Analytics

Usage of Management Tools Evolves With Complexity

The Missing Gap

 Centralized console
for all performance
data
 Summary views
relevant to
applications and
services
 Application-centric event filtering and correlation
 Historical views of performance metrics for
baselining and event analysis

Advanced APM

 Analytics engines for discovering performance
patterns
 Automation – Command and Control

IT Challenges for APM Initiatives
 Reduce incidents and time to repair with very
specific application visibility requirements
 Emphasis on root cause
 Analysis Tools detailing application
performance for preventative care and
capacity planning
 To support line-of-business visibility into
application availability, performance, the risk
associated with that performance, and SLA
monitoring
 To standardize on a common delivery platform
for application support to reduce operation
costs

Best Practices for APM Delivery and Maintenance

 Create a team  Specifically tasked with APM
 Define  Skills: Basic knowledge of
applications, underlying
 Measure
infrastructure, software
 Analyze
components and architectures,
 Improve
and can liaise with business and
 Control development


 Create a team  Choose initial critical

 Define applications
 Gather requirements
 Measure
 Gather all relevant and
 Analyze
accessible performance metrics
 Improve
 Choose tool sets
 Control


 Create a team  Aggregate metrics and create
 Define baseline

 Measure  Determine initial rule sets and
thresholds
 Analyze
 Configure summary views and
 Improve
drill down per defined role
 Control


 Create a team  Iterate with key stakeholders
 Define  Verify that the information is
 Measure correct, and pertinent to role
activities
 Analyze
 Practice scenarios to verify that
 Improve
discovery and drill down to
 Control
analysis or root cause is optimal
per role


 Create a team  Track MTTR improvements
 Define  Determine repair activities
 Measure performed outside of the APM

 Analyze solution, can they be
automated?
 Improve
 Are there other metrics or
 Control
correlations that need to be
included to capture outlier
events?


 Create a team  Tweak thresholds to optimize
 Define alerts

 Measure  Add any new important metrics

 Analyze or correlations

 Improve  Add automated responses
 Add new important applications
 Control

Case Study:
One of the World’s Largest Financial Institutions

Case Study:
One of the World’s Largest Financial Institutions

Real World Best Practices

 Designate main support team and determine roll-out plan
 Choose application group or initial critical applications for
implementation
 Determine user roles exec/application support/tech support
 Determine application architectures
 Determine available monitoring systems and sources of
performance data
 Work with technology support teams and determine agents/no
agent technology
 Determine dashboard templates to create consistent company-
wide standards
 Move to next app group or let app support teams build out

Alert Summary
Composite Objects of Underlying Data

Alerting in Context of Process Flow

Technology Summaries - Web Server Farms

ROI

 Total benefit
– Reduction in outages = reduction in…
• Idle labor
• Loss of business
• Penalties for unmet SLAs/JIT agreements
• Loss of discounts for early payments
• Penalties for late payments
• Cost of idle equipment/telecommunications
• Cost of facilities
• Cost of recovery
• Cost of damage to perceived customer service
• Cost of damage to brand perception

– Improved productivity
– Reduced complexity – faster training of new employees
– Capacity planning
 $35.7MM in Year 1

Conclusion

 The enterprise IT environment is becoming
exponentially more complex
 Multiple disparate unconnected
monitoring solutions are
only adding to the complex-
ity and management costs.
 End to End APM solutions
are not only viable but
have already been proven
to deliver great benefits

TradeTech Architecture 2011 - Rodney Morrison, How to Achieve Success with Application Performance Monitoring Initiatives

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