application performance management (apm) for tibco...
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White Paper
Application Performance Management (APM) for TIBCO® Users
Extending Visibility Across Your TIBCO Infrastructure and Beyond Publication Date: May 2009 Abstract: TIBCO users may wish to expand IT monitoring and management beyond their TIBCO infrastructure. Many SL customers have chosen to extend their TIBCO monitoring and visualization application to a broader Application Performance Management (APM) solution, delivering single-pane-of-glass visibility across their heterogeneous application and IT infrastructure.
APM focuses on monitoring and managing the performance and service availability of software applications. Enterprise companies are increasingly seeking holistic, or 360˚, APM solutions, capable of monitoring and managing a broad range of applications, in order to:
• Provide early detection/preventative care relating to application issues to
reduce the number of trouble tickets. • Determine root cause more quickly and have the power to fix a problem
then-and-there in order to reduce the MTTR (mean time to repair) and minimize impact on customer experience, SLAs and revenue.
• Deliver a comprehensive, integrated solution that reduces overall TCO and makes the goal – end-to-end application monitoring and control – attainable.
Application Performance Management for TIBCO Users 2
Copyright
© 2009 Sherrill-Lubinski Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Trademarks SL Corporation, SL-GMS RTView, RTView, and the SL logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sherrill-Lubinski Corporation in the United States and other countries. TIBCO, the TIBCO logo, The Power of Now, Hawk, Rendezvous, Enterprise Message Service, PortalBuilder, Integration Manager, SmartSockets, ActivePortal and TIB are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of TIBCO Software, Inc. in the United States and other countries. They are mentioned in this document for identification purposes only.
Application Performance Management for TIBCO Users 3
Contents
Introduction ...................................................................................................... 4
Application Performance Management Solutions .............................................. 5
The Challenge ................................................................................................... 5
The Value of APM .............................................................................................. 6
Service Performance Management ............................................................... 6
Capacity Planning ...................................................................................... 7
Chargeback or Service Usage Analysis .......................................................... 7
Required Functionality for an Effective APM Solution ........................................ 7
How Enterprise RTView Delivers APM for TIBCO Users ..................................... 8
Access to All Critical Service Metrics ............................................................. 8
Define the Hierarchy and Rules of a Business Service Model ............................ 8
Supply Real-Time Analytic Processing of the Service Metrics Against the ........... 9
Archive Analytic Processing for Historical Comparisons................................... 10
Allow Definition of Automated Behavior Based on Rules ................................. 10
Provide Configurable Dashboards for Summary and Drilldown Service Views ..... 10
Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 14
About SL Corporation ...................................................................................... 15
Application Performance Management for TIBCO Users 4
Introduction
RTView™ for TIBCO is a software application developed by SL Corporation that enables
users to leverage their TIBCO investment by dramatically enhancing visibility into their
infrastructure. RTView provides a flexible, configurable, out-of-the-box solution to help
enterprises optimize their monitoring of TIBCO Enterprise Message Service™, TIBCO
Hawk® and TIBCO Rendezvous® applications by visually presenting real-time and
archived data from the TIBCO Information Bus (TIB) and other data sources, all without
programming.
TIBCO users may wish
to expand application
monitoring and
management beyond
their TIBCO
infrastructure. Many SL
customers have chosen
to extend their TIBCO
monitoring and
visualization solution to
a broader Application
Performance
Management (APM)
solution, delivering
single-pane-of-glass
visibility across their
heterogeneous application
infrastructure.
The purpose of this whitepaper is to review a number of ways TIBCO users are able to
manage the performance of TIBCO, packaged, and custom applications by extending
visibility beyond their TIBCO infrastructure to other data sources and applications,
thereby delivering a comprehensive APM solution.
RTView provides out-of-box functionality for monitoring and administering TIBCO applications
Application Performance Management for TIBCO Users 5
Application Performance Management Solutions
Application Performance Management, or APM, focuses on monitoring and managing the
performance and service availability of software applications. Demand for a new
generation of APM products is being driven out of a frustration with earlier solutions that
either only focus on a narrow slice of monitoring, or have cobbled together monitoring
tools through acquisition, and therefore cannot provide a single interface to the end-to-
end performance of an application.
The Challenge
In the last ten years, systems management tools have become essential to every large
IT organization, providing a certain level of single-pane–of-glass visibility for network
and systems management needs. Level 1 operation support teams use these integrated
tools to recognize when applications or IT components are failing and provide automated
responses and trouble ticket management. The downside with these systems is that they
are component-based and cannot measure or determine any potential business impact
of a particular component failure. This makes it very difficult to determine how to
prioritize problem resolution or whom to notify in the event of service impact.
Technical Service teams – whose responsibility it is to maintain the performance of
individual IT infrastructure components – and Application Support teams are often the
level 2 and level 3 support groups that try to cobble together a variety of off-the-shelf
and home-grown monitoring tools to determine business impact. This is done with the
goal of understanding how to best respond to trouble tickets related to their systems.
These “tools” may range from applications that monitor middleware, transactions,
application servers, JVMs, and databases, to reams of server log files that must be
manually reviewed. In large organizations, this has given rise to hundreds of
dashboards and folklore about best practices for troubleshooting service problems.
Many organizations now realize that they must standardize around a common and
comprehensive 360˚ single-pane–of-glass visibility solution for application performance
management to make any sense of the large amount of real-time data available, and to
reduce costs for maintenance and training associated with continuing their traditional
practices. They need early detection/preventative care to reduce the number of trouble
tickets. They need to determine root cause more quickly and have the power to fix a
Application Performance Management for TIBCO Users 6
problem then-and-there in order to reduce the MTTR (mean time to repair) and
minimize impact on customer experience, SLAs and revenue. And they need a
comprehensive, integrated solution that reduces overall TCO and makes the goal – end-
to-end application monitoring and control – attainable.
In addition to getting pressure to reduce the number of trouble tickets and MTTR,
application support teams are also being asked to provide line-of-business stakeholders
with visibility into performance management as it relates to business objectives. They
also have pressure from the CIO to manage toward ITIL standards for Incident
Management, Availability, Capacity and Service Level Management.
The Value of APM
APM has a wide audience of potential users in an organization who can benefit from
visibility into application and component metrics including:
• Operations • Application Support Teams • Technical Services • Development • Key Business Stakeholders • Service End Users
Once given a customizable view of applications and the infrastructure metrics that effect
those applications, many people in these roles quickly find a wide variety of key
initiatives that can be implemented to increase performance, optimize expenditures and
reduce costs. Three of the most common initiatives are Service Performance
Management, Capacity Planning, and Usage Analysis.
Service Performance Management
Service Performance Management is the reason that most organizations initially place
APM as a high priority for IT investment. This may be because there are well-defined
internal or external SLAs that need to be monitored, or because the IT group is
measured by its ability to reduce both the number of incidents and trouble ticket
response times. Unfortunately, many companies wait until service downtimes have
resulted in huge losses in either direct revenue or penalties before the implementation of
an APM solution is made a top priority. In either case, it is just as important to look at
Application Performance Management for TIBCO Users 7
trends and have proactive measures for predicting and preventing an incident as it is to
have automated and rapid analysis and drilldown to reduce response times.
Capacity Planning
Organizations generally have mandates to forecast potential growth and then optimally
prepare and allocate the necessary resources. By archiving and analyzing the historical
usage of IT components as related to a particular application, it is possible to have the
detailed information necessary to fine tune required expenditures and increase
confidence that service levels will be met for the forecasted growth.
Chargeback or Service Usage Analysis
Managing IT costs can be difficult when trying to manage applications for a wide variety
of business units. Many enterprises are leveraging APM to enforce a chargeback policy
so that IT costs can be tracked as a line-of-business expenditure. However, even if an
organization does not want to introduce detailed chargeback analysis for usage of IT
services by a department of business unit, great benefits can be found in understanding
those usage levels. Questions such as, “Are my IT expenditures in-line with my strategic
business initiatives?” or “Why is this particular business unit showing such an increase in
usage?” can be answered.
Required Functionality for an Effective APM Solution
Any enterprise-class APM solution must contain these component features to be effective
and have the ability to address expanding business and IT alignment initiatives.
• Access to all critical application and component-level metrics
• Definition of a service model
• Real-time analytic processing of infrastructure metrics against the service model
• Ability to archive service model metrics for analysis
• Define automated response to alert conditions
• Provide configurable dashboards and reports
Application Performance Management for TIBCO Users 8
How RTView Delivers APM for TIBCO Users
SL's RTView platform is uniquely positioned to service the requirements of 360˚ APM
because 1) it has the ability to provide a single, real-time view into complex, multi-
tier applications with historical context, 2) it was developed from the ground up as
an integrated system, enabling seamless analysis across applications and layers, and
drill-down capabilities to pinpoint root cause and initiate repair, and 3) it is a flexible
environment for the creation of holistic application service views that is easy and
non-invasive to integrate, and cost-effective to deploy and maintain.
Access to All Critical Application and Component-Level Metrics
RTView provides access to the critical TIBCO infrastructure metrics from TIBCO EMS,
TIBCO Hawk, TIBCO Rendezvous and TIBCO BusinessWorks. However, TIBCO users
may have other metrics that are relevant to the performance of the applications such
as status information from application servers, databases, networks, and specialized
monitoring agents and systems such as HP OpenView, Microsoft MOM, Oracle
Enterprise Manager, Symantec i3 or other systems. These metrics can be made
available via a variety of RTView data adapters including JMX, SQL, SNMP, Splunk or
custom data adapters.
Define the Hierarchy and Rules of a Service Model
The Service Model is a hierarchical definition which starts from the low-level
infrastructure metrics and bubbles up to define intermediate infrastructure
components that then define the health and performance of a particular application.
Using the RTView Alert Management System, users can define these Service Models
which can then be used to drive dashboards and reports, allowing them to look at
top-level Service status and drill down to their applicable metrics.
Application Performance Management for TIBCO Users 9
Definition of the service model
To facilitate the creation of the Service Model, alert templates can be defined and
parameterized. For example, perhaps a generic status template could be created to
model BusinessWorks and then multiple BusinessWorks instances could use the
same template.
Supply Real-Time Analytic Processing of the Service Metrics Against the
Service Model
Once the Service Model is defined, it is then loaded into the RTView Server. The
Server continually performs the calculations necessary to determine the state of the
Service Model by applying the current values of the infrastructure metrics in real
time. Any layer of the Service Model can be enabled or disabled, and thresholds for
alert rules can be modified at runtime without re-loading the Service Model definition.
This is often important, for example, when certain parts of the IT service structure
need to be brought down for maintenance while others remain live, and when
unusual circumstances require that alert thresholds be temporarily modified to
reduce a deluge of alarms.
Application Performance Management for TIBCO Users 10
Archive Analytic Processing for Historical Comparisons
The RTView Historian provides the perfect solution for archiving application metrics by
allowing you to select any level of the Service Model and save time-stamped metrics in
the relational database of your choice. This data can then be used in dashboards that
allow you to perform activities such as analyzing performance trends, performing
dynamic baseline alerting, managing capacity planning, or providing an audit-trail report.
Allow Definition of Automated Behavior Based on Rules
Any layer of the Service Model can define automated behavior based on its state. That
behavior might be to send an email; write a log entry to a database; or invoke a Hawk
method, a system script, or a variety of other actions including custom commands which
can be written using a Java API.
Provide Configurable Dashboards for Summary and Drilldown Service Views
Many APM solutions only allow for a fixed path to drill down through a series of colored
circles to diagnose a performance problem. This often results in only a very few, highly
trained operations staff who can truly be effective at getting what they need out of the
solution. It also means that most solutions have a pre-conceived and limited notion of
the parameters and initiatives that may need to be addressed once a wider audience
gains access to application management.
RTView allows for the creation of complete, customizable RIAs (Rich Internet
Applications) that can specifically address custom APM initiatives. These RIAs can be
created quite simply without programming using the RTView Builder. This means that
application support specialists can gather requirements from business and development
teams and proceed to implement the solution without having to be experts in Adobe Flex,
AJAX, or any of the other shifting popular Web development environments.
Though it is obvious that drilling down through trees of colored circles would not be an
effective way to perform capacity planning or usage analysis, it should be noted that it
is also not very efficient for looking at application performance. Support teams, business
stakeholders and end users all have very different ways that they want to look at
application performance.
Application Performance Management for TIBCO Users 11
For example, a top-level view of the services supported by various applications of an
organization might show a physical view of those services against a map.
Top-level physical service view
Another top-level view might show a heat map of the different TIBCO BusinessWorks
processes running on a server with visualization of process memory and CPU utilization
Application Performance Management for TIBCO Users 12
Or, a top-level view might show a logical view of the application that shows relationships
between dependent components.
Top-level logical service view
A drill down from an application could be to a detailed and very specialized panel that
shows key metrics from various infrastructure components that support that application,
in this case TIBCO BusinessWorks and TIBCO Enterprise Message Service.
Key metrics supporting an application
Application Performance Management for TIBCO Users 13
The underlying infrastructure metrics can also be specialized and interactive so that the
operator can drill down and look at different slices of the infrastructure data to quickly
diagnose problems.
Detailed infrastructure metrics
SL’s RTView has a broad appeal as a 360˚ APM solution, regardless of what stage an
organization is at in delivering against APM requirements.
• For organizations that do not already have an APM solution, RTView can monitor
and report on all aspects of the application environment and provide immediate
value to application development, engineering teams, as well as operations and
management teams;
• For organizations that already have tools to monitor components of the
application infrastructure, RTView can fill the monitoring gaps that exist, as well
as provide an overall analytics engine for the events, an alerts/rules engine, and
a robust presentation layer if desired;
• For organizations that already have monitoring tools and an overall enterprise
management system, RTView can perform the tough job of aggregating
application data and pinpointing the root cause of the application problem.
Application Performance Management for TIBCO Users 14
Conclusion
To be competitive today, companies need to be agile and responsive to the shifting daily
needs of customers, internal operations, sales channels, and marketing. The complex
architecture required to support these business processes means that important
business information can reside in a variety of disparate locations. Each role in the
enterprise needs its own specialized, aggregated set of that information to make timely
business decisions for their areas of responsibility. Requirements within the enterprise
can change daily and necessitate that each group of inter-related job roles be able to
configure views into that data and distribute that information to their colleagues,
suppliers or customers.
RTView provides TIBCO users with a cost-effective, quickly implemented, and flexible
solution for aggregating disparate enterprise data and delivering a complete 360˚ APM
solution. RTView is unique because it can provide value both as a holistic APM platform,
as well as a point APM solution focused on specific application monitoring. It does so
through a robust set of monitoring capabilities that can directly monitor application
performance data, or integrate existing sources of data from other application
monitoring solutions. With all of the data in a single information layer, RTView provides
comprehensive analysis functionality, alerts and rules, and can easily construct an
overall service model of application performance. This performance data may include
middleware, network performance data, application servers, log files or just about any
other source of information. With the models developed, RTView’s information layer can
forward the information to its own presentation layer, or process “intelligent events” that
will help identify the root cause of the performance issue via an enterprise manager of
managers.
With RTView, enterprise infrastructure information can not only be configured to just
monitor a specific sub-system of the enterprise, but also tailored to fit a specific
business role and provide daily information tailored to the needs of that role. The
information is there. Making it immediately accessible in an easily interpreted form
dramatically enhances business practices.
Application Performance Management for TIBCO Users 15
About SL Corporation Over the past 24 years, SL Corporation has become the most knowledgeable and
responsive provider of real-time monitoring, analytics, and visibility solutions. SL’s
flagship product, RTView, addresses a broad spectrum of operational visibility challenges
spanning application performance management (APM), business activity monitoring
(BAM), and component-level infrastructure monitoring. RTView also has become the de
facto standard for extending the visualization of complex event processing (CEP) engines,
TIBCO messaging middleware, Oracle Coherence data grids, and custom applications.
SL’s exclusive focus on real-time visibility solutions, commitment to customer success,
and partner-centric culture are why thousands of industry leaders have chosen to work
with SL to support their most critical applications and businesses. SL Corporation can be
reached at +1 415-927-8400 or on the web at www.sl.com.
Contact Information SL Corporation 240 Tamal Vista Blvd. Corte Madera, CA 94925 +1 415-927-8400 [email protected] For more information regarding RTView for TIBCO, please visit: www.sl.com