Introduction

Another challenge facing IT organizations is that due to the complexity of the typical IT environment, when the performance of an application is degrading, that degradation is typically noticed first by the end users and not by the IT organization. In addition, when the IT organization is made aware of the fact that the performance of an application has degraded, it typically is unaware of the cause of the degradation. Given the sheer number of components in the IT infrastructure, the time it takes to troubleshoot the problem can be lengthy.

A few months ago, I published a report entitled Application Delivery: A Reality Check . Based on a survey that was administered to 356 IT professionals, that report identified the challenges that IT organizations are currently having relative to ensuring acceptable application delivery. As I highlighted in the report, in 2010 the optimization task that is the most important and the most difficult for IT organizations is relating the performance of applications to their impact on the
business. In addition, in 2010 the management task that is the most important and the most difficult for IT organizations is rapidly identifying the root cause of degraded application performance.

In an attempt to overcome these application delivery challenges and to respond to what their company’s business and functional managers care about, many IT organizations are beginning to develop a focus on Business Service Management (BSM). BSM is the practice of managing IT services from a business perspective, including monitoring the level of service delivered to users who are accessing critical business applications and services. The term BSM is derived from ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) version 3, which defines BSM as "an approach to the management of IT Services that considers the business processes supported and the business value provided."

Visual Performance Manager™ and VPM Connex™
Effective BSM is highly dependent on a performance management system that provides visibility not only into the end user experience, but also into how performance within each of the various tiers of the overall system (e.g., application, server, and network) affects the level of service delivered to the end user. Granular performance measurements provide significant value if those measurements can be integrated with key infrastructure management functions, such as event management, configuration management, and service level reporting. The Visual Network Systems performance management solution for service management is based on Visual Performance Manager (VPM) and VPM Connex, a web services platform that allows third party solutions to integrate with VPM.

Visual Performance Manager (VPM) appliances passively monitor network transactions to determine how end user response time and application latency are affected by infrastructure elements on the end-to-end path between users and application. As shown in Figure 1, VPM recognizes critical business applications and correlates application performance data with network flow data. The resulting end-to-end transaction data is stored in the appliance’s database where it can be accessed and used for troubleshooting, baselining, error detection, performance and availability analysis, trend reporting and other critical management functions.

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