Performance Monitoring Infrastructure In Websphere

The Five Dimensions of Application Performance Monitoring

Gartner Inc. identified five dimensions to application performance monitoring that it found worth evaluating in its recent Magic Quadrant market study.1 Gartner selected companies that had at least 50 customers that use their application performance monitoring (APM) software, and each APM solution had to incorporate at least two of the five dimensions in their product.

This article will look at these five dimensions and review how Nastel Technology’s AutoPilot application performance monitoring products measured up in these five areas in the Gartner study.

Application Performance Monitoring Database

The following four dimensions in application performance monitoring have been used separately for some time. The development of this dimension occurred primarily as a means of taking the mass volume of data produced by the other four dimensions and extracting value from them.

Gartner gives an example where the APM database detects that an end-user application is experiencing a slowdown in response time and the frequency of this slowdown is accelerating. This slowdown has been identified by a set of user-defined transaction profiles.

The APM database then moves into component discovery and model evaluation. The location of the data center in which the problem is occurring is identified in this process. Then the deep-dive monitoring tools identify the specifics within the system so that corrective action can be taken.

The APM Database is coordinated by a complex event processing (CEP) engine designed to integrate the information flowing from the four other dimensions.

Application Component Deep Dive Monitoring

Deep-dive monitoring uses a diverse set of technologies. It goes beyond the snapshots application component discovery and modeling, user-defined transaction profiling and end user experience monitoring provides into the health of a system. It uses these snapshots to provide effective performance diagnosis and problem resolution.

IT systems are highly modular today and often include such diverse elements as database management systems, application server middleware, message-oriented middleware, off-the-shelf application stack frameworks and even network infrastructure. Deep-dive monitoring is a vital component in any application performance monitoring system.

Application Component Discovery And Modeling

According to Gartner, this is the one dimension that needs the most development. Most companies offering this component are amalgamating three diverse technologies to accomplish the task. These three technologies include IT service dependency mapping tools, transaction profile snapshots created from user-defined transaction reports, and SOA topology maps.

User-Defined Transaction Profiling

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Complex-event processing (CEP) engines may also be designed to track user-defined transactions through the application stack and infrastructure that supports the application. User-defined transaction profiling uses two technologies currently to perform this type of profiling—automated transaction-centric event correlation and analysis and transaction tagging.

End User Experience Monitoring

According to Gartner, technology that looks at how applications affect enterprise users and business customers and measure the customer experience uses four different technology types: 1) synthetic transaction-based software robots, 2) network-attached appliance-based packet capture and analysis systems, 3) endpoint instrumentation systems based on classical manager agent software architectural schemes, and 4) special-purpose systems targeted at voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and other complex IP-based services.

Nastel’s Performance in the Application Performance Monitoring Evaluations

Gartner reviewed several of Nastel’s APM products. AutoPilot for WMQ, has been providing deep-dive monitoring and full lifecycle management for WebSphere MQ since its launch in 1994. The ability to provide deep-dive monitoring for Java-based applications and SOA was added soon after. From this base in middleware and application discovery and deep-dive monitoring, AutoPilot has expanded through the use of targeted add-ons—including TransactionWorks for user-defined transaction profiling, and Autopilot M6 for application component deep-dive discovery and operational monitoring—to provide all five dimensions of application performance management database functionality.

Nastel’s performance earned a rating of visionary. Gartner gave this rating to companies that have consistently been leaders in one or more of the APM dimensions. A visionary company also had to have demonstrated their ability to grow rapidly and maintain their position in the submarket they serviced. The company also had to have a business strategy that didn’t depend on acquisitions.

The company’s vision of transforming its product from one that primarily provided message-queuing middleware management in early 2009 to one that completes within the APM space had already been successful by the time Gartner’s study began. Nastel also continues to show a record of strong in growth in the both the financial and industrial sectors.

Nastel’s sales force has had to adjust to the changing dynamics of marketing to business units rather than IT departments, its previous primary market. Its reputation for deep technical competence isn’t as well known among business decision makers, something that Gartner noted. This has changed since the evaluation commenced.

The various AutoPilot modules are customizable and provide a depth of information that makes this application performance monitoring solution very competitive with the better known solutions. Gartner found implementing and maintaining the product slightly more complex than some of the other technology products it tested. When asked to comment on this, Nastel said their support team works very closely with clients to resolve any issues that arise during implementation and maintenance. They are still working with clients that started with them 11 years ago.

With that kind of track record, Nastel Technology, Inc. will continue to be a company to watch in this rapidly evolving field. The ability of its IT applications to support all five dimensions of APM has already been recognized by Gartner, and new iterations of the product have already been released since the study. Application performance monitoring is clearly the technology of the future. Expect Nastel’s AutoPilot to be one of the solutions competing for the top in the next Magic Quadrant study.

1Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring” by Will Cappelli, February 18, 2010

About the Magic Quadrant

The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2010 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the “Leaders” quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

A demonstration of Hyperic and how it enables sysadmins to manage large environments, both in terms of giving them visibility into app infrastructure performance, as well as easing the amount of pain that it takes to install a conventional monitoring system and keep it up-to-date.

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