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NETWORK PERFORMANCE
From the November 2006 |
Automate your monitoring by Balu Rajagopal Comprehensive monitoring tools give managers visibility into the current state of their systems, networks and applications, with the ability to receive alerts and/or reports when network and application problems or system performance issues arise. When things go wrong, however, can your IT staff identify the root cause quickly? How does your IT manager prioritize? Which systems or applications are most important? As applications and their infrastructures become more complex, automating the identification, measurement and monitoring of the most critical applications becomes increasingly important, especially for maintaining a positive user experience. IT managers who use performance-monitoring technology to dynamically manage these complexities are better able to navigate the pitfalls that lead to user dissatisfaction. For instance, in situations where network traffic may be dominated by non-business critical information, other, more important business applications may be held in the queue unable to complete their transaction. With leading-edge performance monitoring tools, however, the system can automatically assign priorities to user and application sessions, making trade-offs between critical and non-business critical processes. Prioritizing the business-critical information on the network translates into faster application response time and service levels for the activities that matter most. Applications that are not fast enough put you at risk of losing customers. Customers may stop using your site or application altogether if they experience repeated problems. Meeting the performance expectation of internal customers is essential, too. When stockbrokers or commodity traders issue a buy or sell order and the application does not execute the transaction promptly, they risk costly missed opportunities. Financial services transactions rely on nearly instantaneous executions, and networks dominated by non-critical tasks or applications not operating at full capacity can be disastrous. The typical monitoring solution does not differentiate between mission-critical and non-essential applications. It makes no distinction between revenue-generating solutions and administrative support systems. Also, many of the solutions do not provide a single integrated view of performance of critical path applications, systems and networks. As a result, IT managers may be responding to middle-of-the-night alerts for insignificant issues, and are unable to support crucial customer-facing, security and operations management applications while chasing a network throughput anomaly. New technologies are available that automatically monitor, report and alert administrators to user-defined, undesirable situations. They allow for a proactive resolution long before user experience levels are degraded, while also increasing productivity of IT staff. Useful performance-monitoring solutions help IT get its objectives aligned with the organization’s business objectives, allowing them to map system and application performance priorities to the same scorecard used to manage their overall business. These solutions will help analyze both business and application metrics, and then permit IT and line-of-business managers to establish a prioritized approach to managing performance issues. They then can define performance standards and fine-tune their systems accordingly. While many enterprise IT managers have performance data available from thousands of servers across the enterprise, to be useful, this data must be appropriately organized. An application performance-management solution should be able to group together those servers that actually impact a particular application or user experience, and provide managers with a “bottom line” number that tells whether or not user experience and service-level parameters are being met. Administrators in a busy IT environment are accustomed to receiving alerts and reports but may receive so many that they shrug them off. Critical path monitoring technology helps managers limit those alerts and reports by isolating only the applications that are paramount to consistently delivering the superior user experience. Enterprise IT staff can then identify, measure and monitor business-critical applications that matter most and not waste time on less critical applications.
Balu Rajagopal is vice president of marketing and business development for
RTO Software, Alpharetta, Ga. |