Tips For Using Application Performance Management
Application Performance Management (APM) enables businesses to source Service Level Agreements with a high degree of business focus
. This article takes an independent look at the value of Application Performance Management (APM), sometimes also known as WAN optimisation.
APM TECHNOLOGIES CAN HELP TOU GAIN HIGHER PERFORMANCE AND LOWER COSTS
To drive profits and remain competitive, Enterprises are compelled to continually push costs down and efficiencies up. The flexibility of Unified Communications combined with improvements in Server performance presents a new, immediate, opportunity for Enterprises to reduce their IT overheads and improve network performance.
A straightforward way of achieving immediate cost savings and efficiency improvements is to consolidate IT servers, centralise applications and populate your network with inexpensive thin clients. Recent research by Business Insights and Gartner has found that savings of the order of 10 thousand pounds per year can be made from every single Windows Application Server eliminated.
However, the shift to central "fat" servers and local "thin" clients makes the flow of data transactions on the network more difficult to control. This resultant complexity directly impacts the experience of users on the network. That's where Application Performance Management (APM) can deliver its Return on Investment.
Without APM, a typical solution to this complex data flow problem is to "throw more bandwidth at it". Give the data more "space" to traverse the network rather than manage it. This approach works up to a point. There are two big downsides. The first is that it's an expensive solution for the buyer or the supplier. The second downside is more subtle but more costly in the long term. Experience demonstrates that an Enterprise will soon learn to use up the capacity available. In practice, excess bandwidth supplied to "prop up" network performance is used for other things like watching online video, email etc. As the bandwidth is used up, the network performance drops again and you need to "throw" even more bandwidth at the problem to restore performance. It's a vicious circle.
Enterprises are becoming increasingly aware that the biggest cost of poor applications performance is financial . Application Performance Management offers Enterprises and Service Providers a smarter and much more efficient way to manage network performance and bandwidth.
Wide Area Network Optimisation using APM is so effective that many analysts, including Gartner, are advising Enterprises not to renew contracts with their Service Provider unless APM is provided.
Word is spreading about the benefits APM offers. A 2009 survey by IDC shows that 48% of Enterprises have either already adopted APM or are planning to adopt it in 2010.
The core purpose of APM is to provide an intelligent solution to the challenge of assuring a good and appropriate experience for your network users at a cost you are comfortable with. You set the budget and the network works to it. You prioritise the network users and applications that need good response rates. You can categorise users and applications to be important and urgent, important and not urgent etc.
For the first time, you can apply your business objectives to your network's performance.
WHAT TYPES OF APM ARE THERE?
There are many forms of APM. In the next section, we look at how to choose between them. Before can we do that effectively, we need to take a look at what the different elements of APM are and what they do.
APM supports business objectives. Therefore, when an Enterprise adopts APM, it is likely to be the first time that the Service Level Agreement with their Provider is focussed on business objectives and not just network performance.
Service Providers are responding to this development by offering APM SLA's based on monitoring, optimisation and acceleration.
Monitoring
As you might expect, this service monitors network traffic profiles and produces management dashboards that provide information about the end-user experience, the performance of applications and in some cases about end-to-end transactions on the network.
Optimisation
This important service takes monitoring information and correlates it to business objectives. It dynamically allocates bandwidth to business critical applications and thereby protects their performance. Some optimisation services offer bandwidth "right-sizing" which allows the Enterprise to specify how much bandwidth it wants to purchase and how applications should perform within this constraint. Our experience shows that this is a powerful way of cutting costs without compromising network performance. Optimisation allows you to give different priorities to different traffic types and applications. This gives you the flexibility of prioritising your voice traffic over non-urgent email for example.
Taking another example, an Enterprise may not be concerned about how long it takes a user to access certain websites and so would place low priority on this activity. The same Enterprise probably is concerned that the billing cycle runs optimally and so would place high priority on this activity. The optimisation software then ensures that demands placed on the network by billing are serviced ahead of demands for certain website access. A "soft" benefit of this is that it enables the Enterprise to permit access to non-essential websites or applications secure in the knowledge that they will not impede business performance.
Optimisation is important if you have a mesh or "any-to-any" network configuration where the traffic flows can be very complex.
Acceleration
Acceleration prevents redundant and unnecessary data bits from traversing the network. It therefore protects the latency, jitter and packet loss performance of the network connectivity.
In a "hub and spoke" network configuration, acceleration without optimisation may be a perfectly satisfactory solution to assuring network performance. This is because the traffic flows are simpler.
As you can see, the different types of APM suit different network architectures and so the best choice of APM for you depends on your network configuration, the applications you use and the performance assurances you are seeking to obtain.
by: Lucy Green
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