Application Performance Management

Visual Performance Manager provides the performance information to optimize the delivery of application services whether you are deploying new applications or optimizing application delivery. Designed with ease-of-use in mind, the user can quickly scan the health of critical business applications, problematic remote sites and servers, and isolate the root cause of performance issues. The application performance management solution in Visual Performance Manager includes the Application Performance Appliance and software on the Visual Performance Manager Server.

Visual Performance Manager – Optimizing Networked-Application Delivery

To ensure continuous delivery of critical business services, Visual Performance Manager application performance solution provides enterprise views of critical applications so that you can proactively focus on problematic application, site or server before impacting user productivity. Baselines are automatically generated for application response time, network round trip time, server connect time and end user response time by application and site. When deviations occur, alarms are generated to notify the user.

At a glance actionable visibility - Summarizes end-user response time of mission critical applications, slowest sites and servers. (click to view larger image)

With 1 minute granularity information, displaying end user response time with application, network and server components, the infrastructure team can quickly pinpoint the problem domain eliminating finger-pointing between the groups. (click to view larger image)

Application Performance Appliance

The application performance appliance is a proprietary hardware/software component that feeds application performance data to the Visual Performance Manager server. The application performance appliance is a passive device that is deployed in the data centers where the server farms reside. It collects data via tap or span port of the switches, which interconnect Web servers, application servers, database servers, streaming media servers, and DNS/ DHCP servers.

Through this connection, the application performance appliance is privy to all client traffic to the Web servers, requests to the application servers, and subsequent queries to the database servers – no software agents are required at remote client-side.

Application Performance Appliance-ESA

An example of the Application Performance Appliance deployed with Visual Performance Manager.

Visual Performance Manager – Application Performance Impacts Business Services

As business executives are more involved with technology investment decisions to improve business services delivery, they require visibility of the resulting improvements. Visual Performance Manager provides a high-level status overview of application performance and impact on critical business services.

Overview of status of critical business applications with drill-in capability for problem investigation. (click to view larger images)
Link directly to investigate End User Response Time of the application. Quickly identify application response time as the issue as it periodically exceeds the Typical Performance Indicator. (click to view larger image)	Focusing on a time period to further investigate the specific transaction that had exceeded the threshold for End User Response Time and be able to view the client/server responses. (click to view larger image)
Solve application performance issues related to oracle, SQL, SAP, Citrix, Web, MySQL and others by drilling down to a list of transactions, then creating the trace files to share internally or with outside vendors. (click to view larger image)	IntelliTrace™ is a patent pending technology that, within seconds, provides users with an intelligent trace file retrieval mechanism that is based on a particular application performance event or degradation in service delivery. (click to view larger image)

Identifying Root Cause Of Performance Problems

One of the challenges of segmenting a performance problem is to determine the problem domain early on in the troubleshooting process – application, server or network. If it is the network, be able to characterize the traffic and determine impact on the users. Multi-tier applications present unique challenges since traditional analyzers cannot show the relationship of the application traffic between the tiers in a meaningful way for problem identification.

Viewing application performance from the servers' perspective including server health metrics such as CPU utilization, memory and disk usage. (click to view larger image)

Managing Business Critical Multi-tier Applications

Minimize business impact by reducing mean time to identify and solve performance problems and improve IT resource utilization by providing performance information in an easy to understand format for team members from multiple disciplines.

Visual Performance manager simplifies multi-tier application troubleshooting by providing time-correlated views of back-end transactions. (click to view larger image)