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PERFECTING APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

eGuide
The enterprise application scene has gotten increasingly complicated over the years, first with the rise of Web services
and service-oriented architecture (SOA) environments and now with Web 2.0, virtualization and cloud computing.
The growing complexity, of course, makes application performance management all the more difficultnot to mention
all-important. The end-user experience is paramount, and when it comes to todays application consumers, patience
isnt a strong suit. In these articles, Network World and its sister publications Computerworld and InfoWorld explore
how to get the best performance out of todays application environments.

IN THIS eGUIDE
2 Aberdeen 4 Five Tips for 7 Top Five 9 Amazons Data 11 For Web Apps, 13 Mobile 14 Virtualization,
Spotlights Web Getting the Best Questions Before Center Outage Performance Employees Want End-user
Application Web Application Buying into a Reads Like a Remains an Speedy Apps Experience and
Performance Performance Web Management Thriller Uphill Battle App performance critical the Management
Scheme The outage shows why to mobile productivity, Conundrum
Firm shares best practices Web development expert The outage shows why
Experts say to home in on performance monitoring survey finds
for optimizing Web hands out best-practices performance monitoring The benefits of virtualization
application performance advice data gathering, correlating services are gaining services are gaining
can be bogged down in
in the enterprise processes ground ground
outdated management
methods, says Yankee
Group

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ABERDEEN SPOTLIGHTS
WEB APPLICATION PERFORMANCE
By Ann Bednarz Network World

quality of end-user experience, including users network

Firm shares best practices for optimizing
Web application performance in the enterprise
When application performance suffers, so does business
performance.
Aberdeen Group research shows that issues with appli-
cation performance could impact corporate revenue by up
to 9%. Additional data shows just how quickly Web visitors
can get turned off by poor Web application performance.
In a study of 160 organizations, Aberdeen found that
business performance begins to suffer after 5.1 seconds
of delay in the response times of Web applications. An ad-
ditional one-second delay in response times can impact
customer satisfaction by up to 16% and impact conver-
sions by up to 7%.
For each second of delay, your business performance
can be significantly impacted, says Bojan Simic, an Ab-
erdeen analyst.
A key takeaway from the research is that companies need
to be able to gauge end users application experience, Simic
says. But its not as simple as monitoring gear, he adds.
There are still a lot of people who think quality of end-
user experience is something that can be measured in-
ternally, that if you have good capabilities for monitoring
your internal infrastructure, then you should have a good
idea about what end users are experiencing, Simic says.
But its not about that. Many other things can impact the
connections, browsers and more, he says.
To that end, 48% of survey respondents say they are taking
action or planning to take action so they can better measure
application performance from the end-users perspective.
Other actions companies are considering include: im-
proving application performance in the development
stage (cited by 39% of respondents); conducting load
testing of Web applications prior to their launch (32%);
benchmarking application performance against competi-
tors or industry leaders (24%); and measuring the impact
of performance issues on revenues (18%).
When it comes to best practices for optimizing Web
apps, the companies that Aberdeen says are best-in-class
share a few capabilities. For example, they are nearly
three-times more likely to be able to monitor performance

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ABERDEENS Develop capabilities for a job-specific view into application performance; deploy
capabilities for monitoring the geographical distribution of content demands; and
DO-OR-DIE deploy tools for load testing of Web applications.

across multiple browsers and end-user platforms than
other companies. They are nearly four-times more likely
to have tools for balancing content demands across de-
vices dynamically, and three times more likely to be able
to measure end-user experiences via passive monitoring.
For those who want to improve Web application perfor-
mance, Aberdeen cites a few must-do actions: Develop
capabilities for a job-specific view into application perfor-
mance; deploy capabilities for monitoring the geographi-
cal distribution of content demands; and deploy tools for
load testing of Web applications.
One thing that makes it hard to stay on top of Web ap-
plication performance is getting IT staff members from dif-
ferent areas to work together. Nearly half of respondents
(45%) said one of their top challenges is coordinating appli-
cation developers, server teams and network management.
Organizations are increasingly realizing that the com-
munication between application development and the
systems and network is important for two reasons: faster
troubleshooting of performance issues and eliminating
performance issues before applications are rolled out into
production, Simic wrote in the report.
Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.

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FIVE TIPS FOR GETTING THE BEST
WEB APPLICATION PERFORMANCE
By Beth Schultz Network World
Web development expert hands out best-practices advice
Thomas Powell, founder of Web development firm PINT
and a Network World tester, has been monkeying around
with Web applications since the commercial Nets forma-
tive days. Over the years, hes accumulated tons of experi-
ence building Web applications and making sure their per-
formance stays up to snuff. Here he provides some of his
best-practices advice for dealing with Web site application
and performance management.
1. When youre monitoring for performance,
make sure youre truly seeing your applica-
tion from a real users perspective.
Unfortunately, most Web site owners today are in a state of
Aberdeen on Web Getting the Best
App Performance Web App Performance
blissful ignorance when it comes to understanding how
their applications are performing, Powell says. This is espe-
cially the case at companies with public-facing Web sites.
On public-facing Web sites, there really is a sense of
Oh, were doing it right because I see it all right. But
they dont see it through the eyes of the people who are
out on the Net. They might try, but theyll have a lot of
monitoring systems and a full-blown NOC, so thats al-
ways from their perspective. Theyre not seeing it from the
user perspective, he says.
When users experience a problem with a Web applica-
tion, they rarely take the time to alert a company that
something is amiss on its site, and the performance man-
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agement tools available today mostly only provide one
piece of the picture. Depending on the type of Web appli-
cation and performance management tool in use, a com-
pany might have great information on how fast packets
are traveling end to end, or how many page views a user
generated while on the site. But really, those things dont
amount to much because theyre not telling you what the
user is experiencing.
As an example, Powell recounts being called in to help
one company figure out why users were experiencing per-
formance problems with a new Flash animation program.
The company was monitoring file-transfer speeds across the
WAN, and the packets were flying across broadband links.
But the company wasnt accounting for this reality: In some
cases, those broadband links attached to older systems with
CPUs that got bogged down in processing the animation.
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Why arent they putting more stuff in my cart? Why arent they filling out the rsum
ASK AND YE form? Why do people complain about the form? These are the questions you want
SHALL RECEIVE answered; design or find the technologies and tools to answer them.
Thomas Powell, founder, PINT

The fix was easy enough, he says. Now when the ap-
plication installs, it profiles the user system, determines
what it can handle, and adjusts itself to deliver just the
right amount of richness.
These types of problems are all solvable, Powell empha-
sizes. But first people have to acknowledge that it doesnt
matter what they seeit only matters what the user sees.
2. Get your network and Web application
development teams on the same page,
so to speak.
Enterprises need to engender a cross-understanding be-
tween the Web application development and network
teams in order to address the performance management
challenge adequately, Powell says. To get to the root of a
problem quicklyor better yet, to identity and fix a prob-
lem before it crops up for usersyou cant have the people
responsible for network monitoring doing their thing over
in one corner and the developers checking application
status in another corner. This gets back to understanding
the user. Users dont see an infrastructure piece and an
application piece. They just see it as a whole system.
The application developer/network administrator divide
must come down, he says. If the application team receives
a performance alert, it needs to be able to find out whats
happening on the network or in the servers, and vice versa.
You have to train your developers to be network- and
security-aware. Thats the reality of it, he says.
3. Figure out exactly what it is youre
trying to determine about your Web site
before you select a management tool.
Remember, there are no magic microscopes out there, Powell
says. People are looking for a box or software thats like a
burglar alarm. Itll give you an alert and do stuff, but it doesnt
tell you the questions you need to be asking .... If youre not
asking the right questions, the technology doesnt matter.
So a company needs to figure out what information it
needs in order to do the job well. If youre a CEO with an
e-commerce site or a person who runs an HR site inter-
nally, you have a problem, a concern, a worry. Why arent
they putting more stuff in my cart? Why arent they filling
out the rsum form? Why do people complain about the
form? These are the questions you want answered; de-
sign or find the technologies and tools to answer them.
And sometimes, what you need might turn out to be a
simple 40-line JavaScript, a management appliance, an
application monitoring serviceor a combination.
4. Make it easy for users to let you know
when theyre having problems on your site.

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Youve seen sites that simply ask, How do you feel about this
page? and ask you to rate it. Thats great, Powell says. Most
sites dont allow people to complain easily enough. Maybe
you can click to open an e-mail but you cant vote instantly.
Too often, companies use page views as a measure of
success, he adds. Just because a site visitor generates a
lot of page views doesnt mean the person is interested. 5. Always remember, your job is
That person could be frustrated, spinning around in cir- never done.
cles looking at the same thing over and over [but never One certainty about Web application and performance
finding what he needs. And in such a case, that person management is that the process is ongoing. Keep asking
does not like you. But how would you know that? You have the right questions, Powell says, and youll keep discover-
to provide an easy way for him to tell you. ing things you otherwise wouldnt have.

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TOP FIVE QUESTIONS TO ASK BEFORE

BUYING INTO A WEB MANAGEMENT SCHEME
By Beth Schultz Network World

And dont forget to ask whos going to do the initial and

Experts say to home in on data gathering, correlating processes ongoing integration work, adds Jasmine Noel, principal

1 2
at Ptak, Noel & Associates. Some vendors are great at
How does the tool gather How does the vendor handle providing adapters for ease of integration. But the same
performance data? data correlation? should be true of any vendor you select, she says. Thats
Tool vendors approach the monitoring A Web application and performance manage- how you future-proof.

challenge in different ways. Some monitor
passively, at the server, while others use agents out in
the infrastructure and run synthetic transactions, for
example. Some have a network bent, providing insight
across the network, including the last mile, while oth-
ers are more application-centric. The best tool architec-
ture most accurately reflects the user experience, says
George Hamilton, director of enterprise infrastructure,
Yankee Group.
ment tool that cannot hook into other internal
monitoring systems isnt a whole lot of good. If that data
is in total isolation, it doesnt give you a clue as to where to
look for the problem, and it doesnt help with diagnostics
and troubleshooting, Hamilton says. You need to be able to
correlate the data with other systems and assess whether
the problem resides in the network, on a server or perhaps
in a bad piece of code. The more help a vendor gives me on
the diagnostics piece, the higher it should rate in an evalu-
ation, he says.
3
How sophisticated is the mod-
eling engine for service-level
agreements?
Some of the tools SLA modeling engines
will look only at the transaction, while others will provide a
deeper view, showing how different classes of users interact
with an application, for example. Also important is finding
out how the analysis engine will integrate with other IT sys-
tems. For example, a good engine will recognize when an

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SLA will be missed, identify where the problem likely resides online architecture for Discovery Communications, in Silver zation in Columbus, Ohio, evaluated Web application and
and take action, such as alerting the help desk or Web ap- Spring, Md., to Coradiants TrueSight product. You plug it in, performance management tools, one thing stood out about
plication manager, or entering a trouble ticket, Noel says. attach a cable to the span ports and begin accessing data. Indicative Software (now Nimsoft), which he ultimately se-

4
Without agents to install, the amount of time it takes from lected: the companys thoroughness. At the front end, they
What does the installation plug in to data capture is only about 20 minutes, he says. really wanted to make sure they truly understood our re-

5
process entail?
If youre looking for ease of installation, a Web
application and performance management
appliance may be your preferred technology choice. Thats
one of the factors that drew Patrick Gardella, director of
How much support can my
team expect?
As Tom Eckfeld, senior project manager at
OhioHealth, a nonprofit healthcare organi-
quirements, he says. The vendor team hasnt slacked off,
either. The CTO and that team are constantly looking at
ways to enhance the product and make it more valuable to
us, and theyve tried to stay in tune with new things we are
doing and look for ways to help us out.

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AMAZONS DATA CENTER OUTAGE
READS LIKE A THRILLER
By Patrick Thibodeau Computerworld
The outage shows why performance monitoring services
are gaining ground
When an Amazon Web Services data center lost power re-
cently, the company wrote about the unfolding event with
the brevity and tension of one its bestselling pot boilers.
Our anonymous author, who well call Sysadmin, begins his
story simply, without emotional complications and love interests.
We are investigating connectivity issues for instances
in the US-EAST-1 region, Sysadmin writes on Amazons
operations status board at 1:08 a.m. PT.
With one sentence, were intrigued. Somethings up
with Amazons data center in Northern Virginia, just a
short drive to Washington, Tom Clancy country.
You can almost feel whats going on. Cloud-based ser-
Aberdeen on Web Getting the Best
App Performance Web App Performance
vices are crashing and theres a scramble for answers.
Elsewhere, PC screens are refreshed as readers wait for
an update from Sysadmin, (Kindle edition not yet avail-
able). Some 18 minutes pass. Tension builds.
Sysadmins update refers to isolated power issues.
Inside the data center a real, red-light-flashing drama unfolds.
At first, a single component of the redundant power distri-
bution system failed in this zone, Sysadmin would later write
in a postscript for his audience. But while the data center staff
worked on that component, there was a twist: A second com-
ponent, used to assure redundant power paths, failed as well.
Customers are losing connectivity.
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Whether data center staff cheered when the problem
was fixed remains a mystery. But as soon as the defective
power distribution units were bypassed, servers restarted
and instances began to come online shortly thereafter,
wrote Sysadmin.
Readers wouldnt get those details until later, when Sysad-
min had more information and time. In those early minutes of
the outage, only essential information gets to anxious read-
ers. At 1:51 a.m., Sysadmin wrote: The underlying power is-
sue has been addressed. Instances have begun to recover.
At 2:11 a.m., he writes again: A recovery is well under way.
All thats left are the reviews. Thats where companies like
Wellesley Mills, Mass.-based Apparent Networks Inc. come in.
Apparent Networks offers Cloud Performance Center,
an online service that allows anyone to review--in real-
time--the performance of 16 cloud providers, including
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There are now a number of performance monitoring firms that continuously

BIG BROTHER examine cloud providers and Web sites. Not surprisingly, the use of, and interest
in, such services is growing.

Amazon and Google. It covers such things as bandwidth
capacity, latency and data loss, then scores them overall.
Jim Melvin, president of the privately held Apparent
Networks, said his firm can continuously monitor network
performance over WANs using technology it has extended
to the cloud. The monitoring is done with a very light-
weight stream of packets that continuously travels the
network to monitor activity and cloud performance.
With the available free version of its PathView Cloud
tool, users can detect performance issues with the net-
work or cloud provider, and see whether service level per-
formance agreements are being met, Melvin said.
Apparent Networks, which has begun issuing perfor-
mance advisories on cloud providers, offered up just
such an advisory on Amazon, detailing when connectivity
was lost and restored from various locations in the U.S.
It characterized the nearly 45-minute interruption in ser-
vices as severe. (Amazon officials werent available for line retailer, for instance, might have Gomez run a product
additional comment.)
There are now a number of performance monitoring
firms that continuously examine cloud providers and Web
sites. Not surprisingly, the use of, and interest in, such
services is growing.
Even in the current recession, one performance mea-
surement company, Keynote Systems in San Mateo, Calif.
reported $80.1 million in revenue in the quarter ending
Sept. 30, 2009, up 4% from a year ago. And with an eye
on bolstering its performance monitoring abilities, man-
agement software vendor Compuware Corp. recently ac-
quired Gomez Inc., a Lexington, Mass.-based monitoring
service for $295 million.
According to Mike Gualtieri, an analyst at Forrester Re-
search Inc., companies provide a service that periodically
runs scripts against the functionality of Web sites. An on-
search and shopping-cart script every three minutes to
make sure the retailers site is up and performing at an
acceptable level. And that monitoring is done from differ-
ent locations around the world.
That way, its possible to find out whether performance
hiccups are local or global.
Compuwares acquisition of Gomez, is very interest-
ing because now they can provide end-to-end monitoring,
from the user in a browser all the way back into the ap-
plications behind the scenes, said Gualtieri.
Continuous monitoring of cloud services is a prerequi-
site to any firm considering deploying mission-critical Web
applications in the cloud, said Gualtieri.
And it means that companies dont have to rely exclu-
sively on first-person Sysadmin accounts of trouble to find
out how the story ends.

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FOR WEB APPS, PERFORMANCE

REMAINS AN UPHILL BATTLE
By Neil McAllister InfoWorld

When Firefox 3.5 arrived, it brought with it this major advantage,
according to Mozilla Foundation developers: speed. The latest
version of the open source Web browser is the first generally avail-
able release to include the TraceMonkey accelerated JavaScript
engine, which previously had been found only in the 3.1 betas.
This move is the latest volley in the rejuvenated browser wars,
as browser vendors shift their focus toward improving the per-
formance of Web-based applications. Google set the pace when
it shipped Chrome with a high-performance JavaScript engine
in 2008. Since then, Opera and Apple have both announced
new JavaScript engines for their respective browsers, and even
Microsoft has grudgingly worked to optimize IE8.
But browser performance isnt everything. Users experienced
delays browsing major news sites in the wake of the death of pop
star Michael Jackson in the summer 09, but the problem there
wasnt slow browsers or even overloaded servers. According to
Web monitoring company Keynote Systems, in many cases site
slowdowns were caused by ad networks and other third-party
content providers, whose own networks couldnt handle the in-
creased traffic.
This incident underscores an issue of growing concern to
Web developers. Modern Web apps typically draw from multiple
content sources, data stores and services, and growing inter-
est in cloud computing will only accelerate this trend. But given
all these interdependencies, can Web developers really guaran-
tee fast, responsive user experiences? Or as the complexity of
our applications continues to grow, is application performance
gradually slipping out of our fingers? Are we all just throwing
ourselves on the mercy of the Internet?
Web Developers Cloud Conundrum
Making Web pages is easy, but building efficient Web applica-
tions can be deceptively tricky. Desktop software is tangible;
as a developer, you can get your hands around it. To optimize
its performance, you do things like eliminating memory leaks
and improving the efficiency of disk access. None of this ap-
plies to Web apps, however, where developers rely on brows-
ers to handle local resources efficiently.
Instead, Web developers are confronted with the vagaries
of the network. If a user accesses a Web page that draws im-
ages from a third-party provider, the overall user experience
depends on the users browser, the users data connection,
the outgoing pipe from the Web server, the Web application
software, the pipe between the Web server and the image pro-
vider, and the image providers server software. A Web appli-
cation developer is in a position to optimize only one of these.
Consider what else developers take for granted in this dis-
tributed, cloud-based model. How can you be sure that the

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third-party image provider takes security seriously? How can
you be sure that its systems are sufficiently redundant, and
that it makes backups regularly, so you wont be blindsided by
any unexpected outage? You can ask, of course.
A more immediate problem lies in the ways in which ex-
ternal services integrate with Web pages. Most of them rely
on external JavaScript, iframes, or both. Either of these tech-
niques can block a pages onLoad event, a major factor in
the users perception site slowness. This bottleneck happens
before the JavaScript code executes, so the speed of the
browsers JavaScript engine makes little difference. Combine
this design with an overburdened network, and its not just
third-party content but your entire application that suffers.
Increased Complexity, Greater Risk
The Web community is working on ways to mitigate these prob-
lems. For example, modern browsers load other content ele-
ments while theyre waiting for JavaScript to execute, and devel-
opers have come up with various clever techniques to eliminate
script bottlenecks. But these one-sided optimizations can only
get you so far, and theyre difficult to do right.
Think about it, says Steve Souter, a performance evange-
list at Google and author of the books High Performance Web
Aberdeen on Web Getting the Best
App Performance Web App Performance
Sites and Even Faster Web Sites. He adds, Were taking a
chunk of HTML that might also include CSS, JavaScript, and
Flash, and stuffing it into another page. ... Its not surprising that
they can, and do, significantly degrade the performance of Web
pages, and in some cases can cause a Web site to fail entirely.
Part of the problem lies in the fact that such content-integra-
tion efforts often lack cohesive management and oversight. In-
tegrating third-party content into a Web page would be a complex
project to pull off for two teams working in the same company,
Souter says. In the case of ads, the two teams work at two differ-
ent companies. In fact, the developers creating the ad probably
never interact with the team building the main Web site.
Thats not to say that everyone will share the responsibility
for site slowdowns, however. Rest assured that when site per-
formance degrades, the user will place the blame squarely on
the sites own brand: The external content providers will remain
virtually anonymous.
Baby Steps
For now, Web application developers and architects should be
sure to educate themselves about the potential bottlenecks and
other pitfalls inherent in distributed, cloud-like Web applications.
Souters books are a good place to start, and Google has recent-
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ly launched a Web site dedicated to developing best practices
for JavaScript performance.
In the long run, however, Web services providers and consum-
ers will need to work together to develop standards of practice
for the cloud-based Internet. The Interactive Advertising Bureau
has formed a working group and offers best practices for ad
providers to improve load times. This is a good start, but clearly
theres still much more work to be done.
One of the more troubling aspects of the current situation
is that it tends to favor larger customers. Wal-Mart or a major
sports league might be in a position to demand comprehensive
SLAs and developer accountability of their external content pro-
viders, but a struggling newspaper publisher might not--to say
nothing of even smaller clients.
Thats why its of critical importance that the Web com-
munity work to increase not just browser performance, but
the performance of cross-organizational Web development
teams. As sites and services become increasingly intercon-
nected, we need to come up with new ways to communicate,
collaborate, and cooperate to make distributed, cross-site
development efforts run more smoothly. Only in this way will
the cloud-based Web flourish into a reliable, first-class ap-
plication development platform.
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MOBILE EMPLOYEES WANT SPEEDY APPS

By Ann Bednarz Network World

would load more quickly, and 33% report that accessing

App performance critical to mobile productivity, survey finds
Anticipating greater numbers of employees working on the
road? Better pay close attention to application performance.
As more employees work outside the office and need
remote access to files, the issue of productivity is getting
greater attention.
Poor application performance--not surprisingly--im-
pacts employee productivity. It also affects employees
willingness to work remotely, according to a new study
conducted by Harris Interactive (and commissioned by
Riverbed Technology, which makes WAN optimization
software for mobile users). Basically, if employees cant
efficiently access business files or software while on the
road, theyre going to be less inclined to work offsite.
The survey polled 900 U.S. adults who are employed
full-time, normally work onsite, and have tried accessing
business files or software from an offsite location. Im-
proving application performance could be key to mobile
growth, the study found.
Nearly half (47%) of employees surveyed are working
offsite more often now than they were two years ago. And
the trend doesnt appear to be slowing. Two-thirds (67%)
of employees polled would like to be able to work offsite
more frequently than they currently do.
One driver is comfort: 54% said they concentrate bet-
ter when working offsite compared to being in the office.
But not everyone is satisfied with application perfor-
mance. Among employees surveyed, 40% say they would
work offsite more often if their business files or software
business files or software remotely negatively affects their
productivity.
Harris Interactive also asked about where employ-
ees were working when they werent onsite at the office.
Among the more popular locations for offsite work are:
home (cited by 80% of employees), hotel room (37%),
vacation destination (20%), airport (19%), Wi-Fi enabled
public space (13%) and coffee shop (11%).
Among employees who access business files or soft-
ware from a remote location, 29% do so at least five times
per week.
Employees today are more connected than everno
matter their location. Theyre working from home, on the
road and even on vacation, said Eric Wolford, senior vice
president of marketing and business development for Riv-
erbed. Companies need to make it easier for employees
to be productive when working off-site.

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VIRTUALIZATION, END-USER EXPERIENCE

AND THE MANAGEMENT CONUNDRUM
By Denise Dubie Network World

plications that means IT isnt adequately supporting the

The benefits of virtualization can be bogged down in
outdated management methods, says Yankee Group
Managing enterprise IT systems has long left something to
be desired, but the broad adoption of x86 virtual server tech-
nology pushed traditional approaches of managing technol-
ogy to the edge of extinction as IT managers must ensure the
end-user experience isnt impacted by infrastructure failures.
That is, according to a recent white paper by Yankee Group.
Commissioned by network management start-up Xan-
gati, Managing virtualization in 2009A double-edged
sword, examines how enterprise IT management ap-
proaches need to be updated to take on advanced en-
vironments that feature varied virtual elements. Yankee
Group Senior Vice President Zeus Kerravala authored the
report that says not only does IT need to align itself with
the business, but also management systems need to un-
derstand the business to properly manage IT elements.
The dramatic increase in the complexity and mission-crit-
ical role of IT infrastructure for the business has created new
demands on technology management platforms, the report
reads. If IT must align with the business, then the IT manage-
ment model must be driven from a business perspective.
For most businesses today, the most critical alert could
be linked to the end-user experience. If customer service
or IT helpdesk representatives continue to receive calls
regarding poor performance of Web sites or internal ap-
business. Kerravala argues in the paper that traditional
approaches to infrastructure management can detect
problems with specific elements in the environment such
as servers or network devices, but not always in enough
time to prevent a disruption in service to end users. And in
many cases the end user is often the alerting system for IT,
pointing out slow performancewhich doesnt necessarily
mean any one element failed in the environment.
Enterprise IT management needs to be flipped on its
head, so to speak, and the end-user experience must be-
come the first indication of potential problems. IT man-
agement 2.0, Kerravala says in the report, takes on the
environment from the top, the end user, and works its
way down to IT infrastructure elements. In this scenario,
administrators are alerted not when an infrastructure ele-

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Resources
App Performance Web App Performance into Web Management Center Outage Uphill Battle Want Speedy Apps Conundrum
PERFECTING APPLICATION PERFORMANCE Sponsored by

ment slows down, but when an end user is forced to slow
down because IT systems are not performing.
This provides the service desk a laser sharp view of the
user experience and how the various objects across all IT
domains support them, the report reads. Rapid problem
identification allows the service desk to focus the trouble-
shooting efforts at the actual problem rather than spend-
ing time simply trying to identify it.
Built on collaboration, visual streaming and user-gen-
erated contentall of the Web 2.0 worldIT management
2.0 promises benefits for IT departments as well as the
end-user communities they serve. IT groups can more eas-
ily use advanced technologies such as virtualization and
cloud computing, while also seeing faster problem resolu-
tion times and overall better visibility into infrastructure
trends. End users, on the other hand, are able to take
control of their problems with self-service portals and en-
hanced training. IT managers must adapt their manage-
ment tools to take advantage of todays technologies and
enable end users to better experience and appreciate
technology, Yankee says.
Traditional management systems, also known as 1.0
management, were built for a different era of IT. An era
where the infrastructure was static, users were located in
corporate offices and virtualization did not exist, the re-
port reads. The infrastructure has evolved and the man-
agement tools must keep pace.

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PERFECTING APPLICATION PERFORMANCE Sponsored by

APPLICATION PERFORMANCE RESOURCES

WHITE PAPER WHITE PAPER WHITE PAPER WHITE PAPER

BEST PRACTICES: BEST PRACTICES: BEST PRACTICES: BEST PRACTICES:

APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAgEMENT APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAgEMENT APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAgEMENT

OVERVIEW DATACENTER NETWORK MANAGEMENT JAVA AND .NET

OVERVIEW DATA CENTER NETWORK MANAGEMENT JAVA AND .NET

This series of best practice papers explores APM,
focusing on problem and incident management,
two of the core Information Technology Infrastruc-
ture Library (ITIL) processes facilitated by APM. This
first part of the series provides an overview of APM
design, implementation and operation fundamen-
tals, discussing end-to-end APM as a process and
the key areas that impact overall service delivery.
In this second part of the APM series,
APM and resource performance manage-
ment best practices are shown to enable
true end-to-end application service for
heterogeneous environments, including
distributed and mainframe.
In this third part of the APM series, applica-
tion performance management is explored in a
network-dependent application delivery model.
Learn about setting appropriate goals, establish-
ing baselines and improving overall application
performance through network management.
In this fourth and final part of the APM
series, learn about Java and .NET applica-
tion performance management, performance
management instrumentation and effective
APM methodologies in Java and .NET
environments.

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App Performance Web App Performance into Web Management Center Outage Uphill Battle Want Speedy Apps Conundrum