Aligning IT Best Practices and Network Application Performance
Over time, competition, innovation and maturation of certain sectors and business functions drive the creation and implementation of best practices. Industry sector examples such as Construction and Manufacturing have been well-documented and benchmarked as significant best practice examples. Business performance improvements driven by best practice adoption in these industries are quantified and empirical. In contrast, Information Technology (IT) can be characterized as emerging in this regard, just beginning to fully focus on best practices.
IT best practices can be summarized as a set of methods, techniques, processes, behaviors and automation that when consistently applied produce increasingly effective and efficient results. The portfolio of available IT process frameworks (ITIL, CMMI, etc), standards, methodologies and automation solutions is extensive. The primary goal of IT best practices is to optimize the alignment and utilization of technology resources towards the execution of business objectives.
Key Issues
Business Service Management (BSM) is a key area of focus within IT best practices. BSM is the practice of quantifying, monitoring, measuring, reporting and managing IT services from a business perspective.
Prior to best practice adoption, a majority of IT organizations deliver services from the technology “silo” or domain perspective. Technology domains include areas such as mainframe and network. Domain based management and reporting results in misalignment of expectations and results between IT and business stakeholders.
Business Service Management best practices generally include the creation of service level agreements between IT and the business stakeholder or customer. Significant transformative activities involving people, process and technology are required by IT to transition from technology domain management to the management of discrete business functions and services.
Technology monitoring and management automation play a critical role in enabling and achieving BSM objectives. “End to end” or holistic visibility and reporting of application availability and performance are a critical capability for enabling IT to transition to business service management.
Approaches
IT organizations transitioning to best practice BSM are tasked with leveraging, re-configuring and supplementing existing automation investments to achieve BSM goals. Managing applications holistically with traditional technology domain and overarching “manager of manager” tools is difficult, if not impossible without supplemental automation capability and improved full lifecycle process discipline. Orderly transition of automation to BSM objectives requires IT to document its current automation architecture, define the future-state architecture, perform a gap analysis, select supplemental solutions, and implement the projects that achieve the new automation architecture.
Network resident application performance management solutions deliver proven “quick win” or rapid time to value for holistic application and business service management capabilities. These network centric solutions address the immediate challenge of quick starting BSM automation and they easily integrate into the longer term strategic eco-system architecture.
Best Practices
Holistic application availability and performance management is a difficult challenge as IT personnel lack enterprise-wide visibility of applications and their underlying infrastructure components. Ensuring application service levels depends on the ability to dynamically discover applications, users, underlying interdependent infrastructure components and visualize those applications in the context of business services.
Deployment of datacenter resident Application Performance Management (APM) appliances provides holistic transactional visibility to business critical applications. APM information combined with network flow information provides “end to end” transaction visibility including the network components traversed. APM appliance solutions passively monitor application transactions as they occur. These appliances differentiate between - and report response time for - user, network and application tiers. Transaction details and summary information are stored in the appliance database. Detail and summary information is leveraged for troubleshooting, base lining, error detection, performance and availability analysis, trend reporting and many other functions.
Fluke Networks provides a portfolio of tightly integrated solutions that result in network based comprehensive application availability and performance management. The integrated Fluke solutions provide a single holistic view with analysis capability through the Virtual Performance Manager product.
Fluke Networks pre-integrated appliance based solutions deploy in the fraction of the time it takes to reconfigure and supplement existing manufacturer monitoring frameworks or best of breed eco-systems. Fluke Networks solutions provide rapid business service management value, are compatible with major framework products and quick-start IT business service management transformation.
