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This white paper is written for CIOs and IT executives tasked with providing a strategic vision for delivering high-quality business applications at a reasonable price. It addresses high-level objectives, such as aligning IT with the business, improving IT service quality, and reducing IT costs, and also provides a structure for addressing tactically-oriented challenges, such as superior end-to-end application performance management. The paper discusses end-to-end application performance management in the context of the impact to the business. It then highlights CA’s application quality and performance management
solutions for both Web and mainframe applications, with particular focus on the integration of CA Wily with AQM Solutions’ TRILOGexpert APC for TriTune with Performance Desktop. This combination opens up the "black box" of Web-to-mainframe
transactions, providing visibility essential to the process of effectively addressing
end-to-end application performance management. It concludes with the Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) perspective on the market in general, and on the CA solution in particular.
Executive Summary
Although most enterprise IT organizations have successfully addressed the needs of monitoring and managing the technology silos that comprise the data center, EMA research has shown that application performance management maturity trails these other disciplines. There are technical and cultural reasons for this disparity,
but the bottom line is that IT organizations cannot continue with business-as-usual in addressing application performance management.
Increasing complexity of technology from initiatives like Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), coupled with proliferation of applications and rising expectations from end users, are threatening to overwhelm IT staff. The result can manifest as a wide range of ills, including unacceptable lead times required to develop and deploy new services, and poor reliability and performance of existing applications.
EMA believes that the time has come for enterprises to take a serious look at their approach to end-to-end application performance management.
Application monitoring must be more robust than checking the status of the servers
in the data center. A deeper dive into the transactions that comprise the application, as well as a cross-cultural management approach involving both application specialists and mainframe experts, is required. Products that can look into the “black box” of mainframe
transactions in context with Web applications are key to such efforts.
New integration and intelligence engine technology such as CA Wily Introscope’s integration
with APC for TriTune with Performance Desktop provides this vital link between Web and mainframe transactions. Such a link provides new data for performance analysts needing to understand the big picture. In short, an automated, integrated approach to application performance management is a critical component for successful, proactive enterprise IT operations.
CA Wily Plus TRILOGexpert Products:
User to Mainframe
The CA solution consists of products that provide both Web application performance
management and mainframe application performance management. CA Wily Application Performance Management includes CA Wily Introscope for root cause triage and CA Wily Customer Experience Manager for business level visibility to provide a transactional approach to managing Web applications. On the mainframe, TRILOGexpert TriTune is a full-featured performance measurement and analysis solution
for z/OS and its subsystems – CICS, IMS, DB2, CA IDMS, CA Datacom, WebSphere Application Server for z/OS and WebSphere MQ. The strength of TriTune lies in its ability to identify performance delays in transactions and to measure the overall performance of application
processes. APC for TriTune with Performance Desktop supplements
TriTune by adding powerful, automated pre- and post-processing
functionalities for use in production. APC for TriTune with Performance Desktop automatically finds and prioritizes concealed tuning opportunities resulting from excessive resource demand, initiates
TriTune measurements and automatically analyzes the results. Combined, the two product lines introduce a new paradigm for managing
and tuning end-user facing mainframe applications.
Putting End-to-End Application Performance Management into Industry Context
EMA research shows four very distinct phases of maturity for large enterprise IT organizations.
In the earliest stage, which we will call Reactive, the focus for most IT organizations
is passing problems quickly to specialists for resolution. Tools are purchased primarily
to provide monitoring, asset and inventory information for reactive troubleshooting and ad hoc analysis. By EMA estimates, this Reactive stage dominated the industry until late 2005 or early 2006. At this point, most organizations had implemented at least some form of monitoring and management across the IT domain silos with one notable exception:
application performance management.
Analysts have forwarded several theories about why application performance management has lagged behind its IT infrastructure counterparts. First, the development organization is often culturally and organizationally removed from the “data center crowd,” reporting directly into corporate business units. Second, the focus of infrastructure monitoring has been on data center elements with an assumption that, if all the components are running, then the applications using them must also be running. Third, application performance management is not the domain of any one technology silo with responsibility for monitoring
spanning all of IT. As such, a cross-domain approach must be taken to tackling the challenges of application performance management. These factors have led to applications,
whether running on distributed systems or the mainframe, becoming opaque “black boxes,” hampering IT management and monitoring efforts.
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