Application performance management for enterprise applications

Enterprise applications need high scalability to cater to a large end user base. The top issues faced by IT Teams in these organizations are monitoring uptime and ensuring good performance for their business applications.

To resolve these issues, enterprises need to make strategic investments in end-to-end application performance management tools that can empower the IT Operations Team to deliver business applications that meet customer expectations.

Types of applications used by enterprises

The movement of business critical applications like CRM, contact management, Order Tracking, etc. to the cloud is a trend that is picking up very fast especially because of its productivity benefits for a mobile workforce. Large enterprises too have started consolidating their infrastructure and taken up this delivery model.

Traditionally many ISVs also provide SaaS applications for third party organizations (ASPs). There is also a trend to move these applications to a cloud (move online) friendly architecture so that it scales for large organizations and they can reduce maintenance and support costs.

Traditional Network Monitoring Tools are Not Good Enough

Why are these applications typically Complex?

An application meant for a large audience would normally be built using either of Java EE or Microsoft .NET technology. These are normally web applications to make access easy and also multi-tiered for ensuring high scalability. Below is an architecture diagram for a typical web application using the SaaS model of delivery:

Web Tier

The web tier is typically present to serve static content and other rich content. It also helps reduce the load on the application tier by moving specialized roles to the best of breed software.

Application Tier

The application tier consists of the business logic and takes care of the interaction with the data storage mechanisms. It also consists of the Presentation layer in an MVC architecture. The scalability of this tier depends on how many user sessions can be served by the application tier.

Database Tier

This normally consists of an RDBMS like Oracle, SQL Server or databases like MySQL that are quite popular for SaaS deployments. Databases normally are grouped to form a grid architecture that helps ensure high availability and horizontal scalability.

What is the meaning of Application Performance Management?

Application performance management is all about delivering business applications that meet customer satisfaction by deep monitoring, quick troubleshooting and tracking end user experience. In order to do that, the IT Operations team must also be in control of the whole process of application delivery. They should be able to make educated decisions and resolve issues quickly and make optimum use of their time. All these in the end result in satisfied customers, efficiently run IT Operations and better ROI.

What you need:

Traditional Network Monitoring Tools are Not Good Enough. You need to look deeper in to the application to know the real impact of service architectures and real time loads on end user experience.

Enterprise Application Performance Management Tools = Infrastructure Performance Management + End User Experience Monitoring + Performance Troubleshooting Tools

Infrastructure Performance Management:

This consists of tracking performance metrics of applications and servers and ensuring optimal usage of servers. Traditional monitoring tools do simple uptime checks or stop with monitoring CPU Utilization or memory utilization of the Server. However as infrastructure becomes complex, it is essential to monitor the uptime and performance of the various tiers like database servers, web servers, mail servers, and other web services. The advantage of monitoring these metrics is better visibility about the usage of these databases, quicker troubleshooting capabilities and optimal usage of your servers.

End User Experience Monitoring or Application Performance Management

Monitoring CPU Utilization and memory Utilization are useful to ensure the technology side of the resources. However, it lacks one key capability. Knowing that the server running your mail server or running your web server has less than 20% CPU Utilization does not give you the visibility on actual response time an end user experiences while using your services.

End User Experience Monitoring is an invaluable addition to infrastructure performance monitoring because it helps you deliver better quality of service to the service users. It also helps prove to the line of business that you are ensuring the promised SLAs in word and deed.

Deep dive component monitoring helps performance troubleshooting

Application troubleshooting tools help you find out the root cause of a reported problem. For example, a Java Transaction Monitoring tool could get into the details of the Java Transactions executing in an Application Server and help identify which SQL Queries are taking time to execute or which methods in the Java class are slowing down the application. These help save precious time for your application team to resolve a problem.

ManageEngine Applications Manager for Application Performance Management

ManageEngine Applications Manager provides in-depth monitoring for servers, application servers, databases, ERPs like SAP, web services, network services and an array of other application management capability that will help IT administrators manage their resources.
The deep monitoring helps you plan capacity, troubleshoot quickly and view utilization reports for your various applications. It is easy to setup and uses an agentless approach to monitoring. The out-of-the-box support for various applications will help your IT Team to track performance issues from a single console, making it cost effective and easy for your technicians to work on a problem. It also helps group your IT resources for better decision making, capacity planning and alarm management.

Summary:

Enterprises need high scalability architecture to meet their business needs. These architectures make it complex for IT Administrators to manage using traditional NSM tools. Additionally, the pressure to deliver more with less resources force enterprises to make optimum use of the available hardware without compromising end user experience.

ManageEngine Applications Manager helps the CIO to ensure their investments in mission critical applications are functioning as planned in production. Additionally, it helps in knowing application downtimes, capacity planning, and rapid troubleshooting by encapsulating the complexity in monitoring a heterogeneous IT.

For more info and to download a free 30-day trial of ManageEngine Applications Manager, visit www.manageengine.com/apm