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January 29, 2001 |
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Application Performance Management
The Well-Mannered Application
continued...page 3 of 3
By Steve Steinke, Network Magazine
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Concord Communications Inc. began with a monitoring and reporting product that collected data from existing SNMP and RMON agents. Despite success in the network-and traffic-monitoring arena, Concord saw the shape of coming demand for end-to-end application management and made two key acquisitions. In October 1999, it merged with Empire Technologies and gained access to performance-management software geared to server-based applications. Last January, Concord merged with FirstSense Software and gained its line of highly developed client agent technology.
The Concord/FirstSense clients are lightweight. In fact, they're designed to kill themselves if they begin to account for too much CPU capacity, typically usage in excess of 3% of the total. The agents' use of network capacity is also minimal, with only summary statistical information routinely passed upstream, commonly at 15-minute intervals. If communication between the agent and the controller is disrupted, the agent maintains all data as long as it has sufficient storage capacity. FirstSense worked out the client agent distribution problem with mail, Web, or push-type distribution options and automatic installation and registration capabilities.
Another vendor whose first foray into application performance management was based on network-connected probes is Compuware Corp. The suite of Compuware application-management products is called EcoSystems. The probe-based performance-measurement system is EcoScope, while the application-specific server management system is EcoTools. EcoScope functions much as the NetScout Application Flow Management technique does, using a probe to examine each packet from a central location on the network and assigning each one to a specific application flow based on source and destination addresses, port assignments, URLs, and other kinds of "signatures" within the packet. Using the time stamps on the packets in each flow, the probe infers the users' response time without a client agent.
Compuware also offers a number of interesting tools for application performance design and testing. Two programs inherited from its July acquisition of Optimal Networks, Application Expert and Application Vantage, are capable of detecting and displaying network-based application bottlenecks. Compuware also acquired CACI Products in December 1999 and has incorporated that company's traffic-simulation and capacity-planning products into its own line, calling them EcoProfiler, EcoPredictor, and Comnet III.
BMC Software Inc. has a lengthy history of solving application performance-management problems. BMC's Patrol line offers support for many variants of Unix, Windows 2000 and NT, NetWare, Oracle, Ingres, Informix, Sybase, Lotus Domino, Microsoft Exchange, SAP, Baan, and such middleware offerings as Tuxedo and IBM's MQ Series. Individual Patrol modules not only monitor the individual characteristics of server processes, they can also generate synthetic transactions to assess end-to-end performance.
Patrol for Service Level Management works with individual application modules to support the creation, deployment, and operation of SLAs. Companies that use Patrol components or have substantial application-performance challenges involving legacy systems, large databases, and data warehouses will be comforted by BMC's comprehensive offerings, professional services, and training capabilities.
Another vendor whose application performance roots lie in server management is Dirig Software Inc. Dirig calls its agent technology Proctor and sells two versions of it: RelyENT for enterprise customers and xSPress for service providers. The primary difference is that xSPress supports multiple independent views as well as consolidated views, so service providers can show performance measures to their customers without showing them to everyone. The Proctor agent runs as a daemon on the common Unix variants and as a service on Windows NT.
It can communicate via SNMP, HTTP, or File Transfer Protocol. Subagents located across the network report on system resources, monitor processes and log files, and can take corrective action. Specific Application Managers are available for Apache and Microsoft IIS Web servers; Oracle, Progress, and SQL Server databases; Microsoft Exchange; and Citrix MetaFrame and Microsoft Terminal Server Edition. The products come with a software developers' kit to let network managers configure full application-performance management for custom apps. The Dirig products aren't designed to be end-to-end performance-management solutions--Dirig has collaborated with Aprisma Management Technologies and HP OpenView, both of which resell these products.
The foundation of Lucent Technologies Inc.'s NetworkCare division's application performance-management approach is a client agent. Through a chain of acquisitions, Lucent inherited the VitalAgent client, originally a standalone product that made an ambitious attempt to assess the performance of each element of a distributed application from the client side. Lucent has developed supplements to VitalAgent, including VitalNet, which provides network and server performance information; VitalAnalysis, the console application that aggregates performance data, processes it, creates reports, and tracks SLAs; BTMS, which monitors business transaction performance; Automon, a synthetic transaction creation and measurement tool; and VitalHelp, a fault-detection and troubleshooting tool.
The sum of these components is VitalSuite. In October, Lucent introduced VitalSuite SP, which is geared to service providers. Not only does it support independent customer views (and reports) as well as consolidated views for the service provider, it has been retooled to scale to large user populations. If VitalSuite SP fulfills Lucent's claims, it could be a real solution for service providers that need to provide managed end-to-end service levels.
Pegasus from NetIQ Corp., which in May acquired Mission Critical Software, which had itself acquired Ganymede Software, the developer of Pegasus, is another client-centric end-to-end application-performance manager. Its end points can track actual transaction response times or generate scripted synthetic transactions. NetIQ also makes performance-measuring tools for developers and network designers.
Whether a company decides to run critical applications internally or farm them out to a service provider, the managed SLA is set to become the basis for making such decisions. Therefore, service providers and enterprise IT managers will soon be compelled to build the infrastructure that can indicate whether those agreements are being met. Some desirable provisions of application-based SLAs can't be readily measured with off-the-shelf products. In that case, the only possible path will be to deploy management tools that support custom development, including custom agent characteristics. It's also clear that there's no real substitute for instrumenting at least some clients directly, and both synthetic and actual transaction measures have important roles to play.
Furthermore, management tools that simply monitor business processes and promulgate alarms are less desirable than tools that can, for example, restart a hanging process or transfer the processing load to an alternate server. Most of the vendors discussed here have converged on these principles.
The industry hasn't reached the point where end-to-end business processes can consistently be deployed with enforceable SLAs using plug-and-play components. Unfortunately, only companies or service providers with deep pockets can afford the possibility of failed high-profile programming projects. It's hard to imagine widespread ASP success without a comprehensive measurement infrastructure, though.
The growth of E-commerce depends on the successful evolution of application performance-management tools.
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