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February/March 2014 20 Telecom Reseller

R
ICH

Using analytics to detect application

performance anomalies

By Charley Rich, VP Product Management, Nastel
problems arise, especially in today’s com-
IT organizations are under more pressure to plex topologies the failure of a single appli-
deliver exceptional business performance cation is rarely the culprit. Performance
than ever. Further complicating the chal- threats usually are the result of multiple
lenge is the evolving nature of Information issues—and many of these, if caught early
Technology (IT). The rise of Big Data, in the process using real-time analytics,
mobile, cloud, and BYOD have added com- could prevent much larger failures from
plexity, making it ever more challenging occurring. Evading cascading failures is
for IT to acquire the visibility they need to essential. Ideally, IT Specialists should
detect anomalies.
avoid being in the position of putting out
Today, an organization’s application fires—they should be able to make sure the fire never starts. But, without the necessary
infrastructure typically includes Web com- visibility this is no simple task.
ponents, messaging middleware and main- To properly manage today’s application
frames. Application performance is impact- environment, organizations must be able to
ed by many factors coming from multiple analyze the entire application chain from
sources—application servers, messaging end to end, understanding the dependen-
protocols, virtualized systems, capacity cies between the links in the chain. It must
issues and many more. Inevitably, failures also be able to focus on early detection
in one or more of these systems occur—and of abnormalities, differentiating symptom
IT is left to deal with the result.
from cause rather than simply reacting to
Such situations are why Application an outage. The combination of these two
Performance Management (APM) solu- factors provides the level of assurance IT
tions exist. To be effective, APM must deliver three major benefits: it must gain needs in its key mission: to reduce the fre-
enough visibility to see an entire system; quency and duration of outages.
track activities through the infrastructure End-to-end performance monitoring and
chain as they occur; and correlate events— analysis must embrace the entire IT envi-
many of which might seem unrelated—in ronment, from .NET to mainframes. It must
order to spot developing trends before cover a wide range of components from
users are impacted. Surprisingly, a number J2EE application servers, Web Services to
of APM platforms miss on one or more of middleware messaging, brokers and even
these key functions.
legacy applications. It must also be elastic,
To be sure, most APM solutions do a having the ability to transparently scale to
good job of monitoring individual applica- meet unexpected surges in demand.
tions. But, monitoring is not enough. When
See RICH, page 21

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