application performance management - secure 24 · end application performance management services...

A Secure-24 Business White Paper August 2015

Application Performance Management Secure-24 Application Performance Management as a Service

Business Performance Equals Application Performance

Executive Overview

Enterprise applications require high scalability and optimal performance to exceed customer

expectations. The top issues faced by IT Teams in enterprises are monitoring uptime and ensuring

optimal business application performance. To resolve these issues, enterprises must invest in end-to-

end application performance management services that empower IT application delivery and

operations teams to deliver business applications to meet customer expectation.

Application Performance Management (APM) is the monitoring and management of performance and

availability of software applications. APM solutions proactively detect and diagnose application

performance issues before they become mission critical to maintain expected levels of service.

This business white paper discusses Application Performance Management in depth including

current market trends and business challenges. It also presents Secure-24 Application Management

as a Services (APMaaS) as a complete application management solution.

1 | APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT WHITE PAPER

Table of Contents

Introduction: Market Trends 2

Business Challenges 3

Secure-24 Application Management Approach 5

Key Features 6

Key Business Benefits 6

Business Data 6

Monitoring Application Data 7

Reducing Sensitive Data Exposure In Applications 7

Limiting Sensitive Data Exposure When Sharing Data 7

Conclusion 8


Introduction: Market Trends

Increasingly, business performance equals application performance. Users relay on applications to

reach customers, build products, automate business processes, and perform almost every other

business critical task. For IT organizations, application performance and availability are the most

visible indicators of success. Accordingly, IT organizations are changing the way they manage

performance to be more holistic and application–focused. In 2012, EMA found that 81% of

respondents regularly leverage cross-domain teams to tackle and manage application performance.

Gartner also found, in 2012, that 20% of the Global 2000 are trying to reconstruct their entire IT

operational process framework in a way that shifts the central focus to monitoring and management

rather than to infrastructure.

As applications have become more critical, they also have become more complex. The introduction of

service-oriented architectures, agile development processes and DevOps are all causing applications to

sprawl, increase in complexity, while also increasing the rate new applications are rolled out and changed.

At the same time, the introduction of new IT infrastructure technologies, most importantly virtualization and

cloud, has increased the complexity of the application infrastructure. These are the market trends facing

enterprises in IT operations, application support, line of business developers and operations and network

management.

Application Complexity

Today’s enterprise applications are complex as noted in Figure 1. The complexity of applications infrastructures

result in the following issues faced by operations teams, who must deliver optimal applications delivery to meet

customer expectations:

• Lack of appropriate expertise and resources

• Inability to understand the real impact of application downtime

• Shifting of responsibility among various technology teams

• Lack of Actionable Data even with so many monitoring tools

• Increased time to identify the root cause of issues

The complexity of application delivery requires performance management services that span an enterprise

of physical to virtual, on-premise to cloud or hosted platforms.


Figure 1. Complex Applications Model

Business Challenges

In the face of these market trends, IT and application teams are faced with the following challenges: Troubleshooting and recovering from business disrupting application failures. Downtime of business critical applications has a direct impact on a business’ top and bottom line. When application outages occur, it is imperative that IT operations, application and network teams can detect, isolate and fix the problem as quickly as possible. It can often take days, if not weeks to isolate and fix performance problems, and problems are often only discovered after end users contact the help desk. The inability to perform when the application is down is not the type of spotlight application and IT teams desire, but is one they often find themselves in with legacy performance management tools. Failure or delay in finding and fixing recurring and persistent performance problems.

Intermittent and chronic performance problems negatively impact end-user satisfaction and productivity.

While these types of problems are unlikely to generate a help desk ticket, they are very likely to continually

block IT from focusing on adding new business value.

Inability to detect problems earlier to prevent future disruption.

IT usually finds out about performance problems from end-users, after business has already been impacted.

According to Gartner, 70% of performance problems are reported by end-users. IT teams must detect problems

more proactively, so that they are working on isolating and fixing the problem, well before business is impacted.

Proactively ensuring data center migrations, consolidation, expanded deployments, new releases and new

users are protected from application performance issues.


When businesses virtualize, consolidate or migrate data centers to the cloud, they expect to improve flexibility,

cost, and control, but do not expect to negatively impact application performance. When deploying new applications

or expanding existing deployments, it is critical to ensure that the optimal performance organizations require are delivered.

Without the right tools to manage and predict the effects of such infrastructure or application changes on application

performance, however, businesses often find themselves encountering unforeseen performance problems.

Executive and Business Level Reporting

Application performance is not a single group’s responsibility and has broad implications across IT operations,

application teams and business owners. It is imperative in the world of heightened application focus, that IT

is able to communicate broadly and in languages tailored to technical and business audiences about

application performance.

Summary

The bottom line is that application performance equals business performance. Legacy tools provide only a

fragmented view, while IT operations are overloaded with raw data, but lack actionable intelligence. As a result, problem

identification, diagnosis, and resolution take days and weeks instead of minutes. And it can be difficult to communicate the

consolidated, cross-functional view of what is occurring with application performance.

This current state of application performance management results in significant negative impact to business via:

• Revenue loss

• Reputation loss

• Productivity loss

• Quality loss

Figure 2: Troubleshooting Work Flow


Secure-24’s Performance Management Approach

Today’s complex application infrastructure requires a performance management solution across all critical parts of the application delivery chain. Whether organizations are rolling out new applications, consolidating or virtualizing data centers, or migrating to the cloud, managing application performance requires a holistic view that includes: end user experience monitoring, application transaction tracing and component monitoring, and underlying infrastructure and network performance management.

• End User Experience. What is the end user actually experiencing as they interact with the application? Whether using Web or thick client applications, and regardless if users are local, around the world, or mobile, IT teams must be able to monitor and troubleshoot the ultimate measure of application performance: the end-user’s experience. • Transaction Tracing and Component Monitoring. What an end user perceives as a single operation involves many distinct application transaction across many different application components. How do you track, monitor and troubleshoot the performance of each of these critical transactions and dive deep into the various components of the application? • Infrastructure and Network Performance Management. How is the performance and availability of the underlying IT infrastructure and network contributing to the performance of the application? IT infrastructure exists for one reason: to deliver applications. To understand holistic application performance, infrastructure must be managed through the lens of the application. The network in particular is a critical application component whose importance continues to rise with the move to cloud, mobile, SDN and network virtualization.

Figure 3: Secure-24 APMaaS Work Flow

This level of visibility and automation routinely outstrips an organizations IT skill set and labor pool. Teams are built to support the planning, building and running of applications with little resources


available for managing performance and troubleshooting issues. Secure-24 Application Performance Management as s Service (APMaaS) is designed specifically to support applications and ensure critical business data is always available and optimized to meet business demands. APMaaS enables businesses to:

• Monitor using real user data during actual business hours to gain a baseline of what is normal versus abnormal. Spot trends, set sensitivity based on importance to business and alert in advance of outages that impact revenues and reputations. Monitor and collect data on every user accessing every application all of the time.

• Diagnose the problem quickly by combining multiple data sources into a single record designed to isolate who is responsible for fixing the issue. The majority of troubleshooting time is spent with IT groups in “War Rooms” defending their data and positioning that the problem is not their responsibility to solve. By viewing the application from end to end, finger pointing is eliminated with greater time spent on solving the problem.

• Fix the problem quicker with the availability of data to support the root cause. The days of trial and error to determine the required action to restore business back to optimized levels no longer exist. Use the baselines to test the fix prior to moving to production, eliminating costly mistakes and inefficient back out plans.

Figure 4. Secure-24 APMaaS Model

Secure-24 APMaaS is uniquely positioned to offer these key features and business benefits. Key Benefits

• Automates setup, delivery and on-going maintenance of Performance Management requirements. Secure-24 is the “easy button”.

• Built on network and application performance management software from Riverbed technologies, the leader in Application Performance.

• Using Secure-24 experts for application performance monitoring frees up staff to focus on core business development activities.

• 15+ year proven track record of providing managed services to enterprises worldwide.


• Secure-24 ensures delivery of clients’ most critical business data 24x7x365 • In-depth experience supporting the industry’s most critical applications: SAP including HANA,

Oracle (JD Edwards, Hyperion, PeopleSoft and E-Business Suite), QAD, SharePoint and others

• Flexible deployment options: on premise or hosted solutions • CapEx or OpEx options • Automates setup, delivery and ongoing maintenance of Performance Management requirements. Secure-24 is the “easy button”.

Business Benefits • Impact to Revenue - Focus your staff on projects designed to grow the business • Impact to Costs - Transform large capital expenses into a predictable, monthly operating expense • Impact to Reputation - Using Secure-24’s specialized staff and processes ensures your business remains optimized for your users • Impact to Quality - Industry- leading SLAs deliver the confidence that the business is running at the desired state – all the time Business Data When considering an Application Performance Management services, businesses must consider: • Where is the data located? • How is the data viewed? • How is data used? • Where are users located? • How do users access data? Is data accessible via any device? • How is relocated, tested or corrected? • How is data monitored? What are troubleshooting methods? • How are risk and success factors measured?

APMaaS is one component of Secure-24’s Performance and Optimization Practice offering managed services designed to increase visibility, optimization and control of business critical data.

Figure 5. Performance and Optimization


Conclusion

Application Performance Management enables enterprises to deliver the right application user experience by proactively monitoring the network and applications infrastructure. Secure-24 APMaaS, provides comprehensive monitoring across the entire network, including all critical business applications. while reducing problem isolation demands on IT teams and increasing business performance. Expect faster applications, real-time diagnostics, optimal performance and the elimination of “shelf ware”, while reducing problem isolation demands on IT teams and increasing business performance. Learn more at Http://www.secure-24.com

Secure-24, World Headquarters Inquiries 26955 Northwestern Highway Phone: +1.800.332.0076

Southfield, MI 270933, USA Fax: +1.650.506.7200

Performance. Innovation. Trust. We ARE the Managed Cloud.

Copyright © 2015, Secure-24 and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is provided for information purposes only, and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document, and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission.

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