Rodney Morrison, SL’s Vice President of Products delivered a talk entitled, “How to Achieve Success With Application Performance Monitoring Initiatives” at TradeTech Architecture 2011.

1. How to Achieve Success With
Application Performance Monitoring Initiatives
Rodney Morrison
VP, Products
SL Corporation

2. 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

3. 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.

4. 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

5. 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

6. APM Breakdown – The Analyst’s Vision
 End-user experience monitoring
 Runtime architecture discovery
 Transaction monitoring
 Component deep-dive monitoring
 Performance Analytics

7. Usage of Management Tools Evolves With Complexity

8. 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

9. Advanced APM
 Analytics engines for discovering performance
patterns
 Automation – Command and Control

10. 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

11. 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

12. Best Practices for APM Delivery and Maintenance
 Create a team  Choose initial critical
 Define applications
 Gather requirements
 Measure
 Gather all relevant and
 Analyze
accessible performance metrics
 Improve
 Choose tool sets
 Control

13. Best Practices for APM Delivery and Maintenance
 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

14. Best Practices for APM Delivery and Maintenance
 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

15. Best Practices for APM Delivery and Maintenance
 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?

16. Best Practices for APM Delivery and Maintenance
 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

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

18. 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

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

20. Alert Summary
Composite Objects of Underlying Data

21. Alerting in Context of Process Flow

22. Technology Summaries - Web Server Farms

23. Detail JMS Server

24. WebLogic Server Metrics

25. Data Grid Utilization

26. Detail – JMS Destinations

27. JVM Metrics

28. 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

29. 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

30. Questions?