Java and .NET best practices can be an essential part of your APM and can enable critical business transactions. Read this Best Practices white paper to gain a clearer focus on ever-more complex application management.
W H I T E PA P E R
BEST PRACTICES: APPLICATION PERFORMANCE management
JAVA AND .NETW H I T E PA P E R : A P P L I C AT I O N P E R F O R M A N C E M A N A G E M E N T
Java and .NET best practices
Whether or not you've read the earlier papers in this Business Application Performance Management
series, it should be clear application performance When considering APM, keep in mind the goals of identification, prioritization and resolution of performance and availability problems. management (APM) is increasingly important as This discipline-directly related to ITIL's Incident and Problem end users rely on ever-more complex applications Management-should be aligned or integrated with business goals by applying the business's definitions of performance and availability. to enable critical business transactions. In many cases, applications do more than simply enable How do we measure application performance from the business viewpoint? From the end-user perspective, not by the performance of the business, they are the business; business CPU, network, Java method or SQL query, nor even JSP/ASP/servlet. performance is immediately and directly related to While these and other examples of "internal" or component-level metrics are important for root-cause analysis and troubleshooting, as well as application performance. capacity management (and therefore critical features of an APM solution), Whether you're well on the way to adopting Service-Oriented Architecture they, by themselves, are not business goals. Similarly, many business (SOA), experimenting with web services or "front-ending" legacy goals are too abstract to be directly meaningful to APM. Take, for applications with modern user interfaces, it's a safe bet your application instance, the goals of 95 percent customer retention or a 48-hour window infrastructure is much more complex today than yesterday. And what are for underwriting new insurance policies. The intersection of business and the most common reasons for undertaking these endeavors? Enhance IT performance metrics is end-user transaction response time, because it business agility and innovation while reducing costs. In short, IT must is both measurable by IT and meaningful to the business.better support the needs of the business. Modern APM ChallengesWhat happens when IT's APM approach does not align with the performance goals of the business? The business loses revenue due The failure of traditional APM approaches is essentially a story of how to dissatisfied users, diminished brand equity, loss of productivity or collections of infrastructure tools, crafted into performance management competitive disadvantage. This quickly translates to a loss of credibility solutions, have not kept pace with the increasing complexity of for IT operations. IT's reactive response to performance problems application environments. is inherently inefficient. Take, for example, allocating unnecessary infrastructure resources in a blind attempt to solve the problem with In simpler times, it is easy to envision how monitoring the health of the added capacity or pulling staff from strategic projects to solve complex physical system-network, server, disk storage, etc.-reasonably could and poorly understood problems. The greater the inefficiency, the greater provide reliable insight into end-user experience. Think of environments the impact on the business. The resulting higher cost of IT services such as telnet and 3270 applications, the more recent two-tier client/not only affects the business, but also IT. As IT services become more server environments or even today's simple static web sites. As these competitive, the risk of outsourcing increases. systems became more complex, performance management solutions continued to add monitoring capabilities for databases, firewalls, load balancers, web and application servers, SANs, etc. IT also monitored the 2 W H I T E PA P E R : A P P L I C AT I O N P E R F O R M A N C E M A N A G E M E N T
activities of the operating system and application environments. Faced The JVM Tools Interface (JVM TI) is a programming interface used by with a large number of consoles and the resulting "silo" approach to monitoring tools, offering application-specific profiling capabilities such performance management, IT intended to provide an "end-to-end" view as insight into the execution of methods and cla... [download for more]
