BMC's ProactiveNet Analytics product is the subject of this week's application performance management solution profile and user feedback forum. Acquired in 2007 to round out BMC's business service management solution set, BMC ProactiveNet now nests within the BMC service assurance solution family.
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The third annual Apdex Symposium will be held December 9th in conjunctions with the CMG conference in Las Vegas. The program will include results of a user survey. You can provide input to the Apdex cause by filling out the survey which will enter you into a drawing for an Apple iPod Touch along with three chances to win a $100 Amazon gift certificate.
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This week it's Fluke Network's Visual Performance Manager (as well as Visual Uptime) users' turn to share their thoughts, opinions and experiences. Under the banner "Network SuperVision" Fluke Networks has expanded from pure-play network infrastructure monitoring into data and voice application performance management over the past two years.
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Apdex is dead simple. It is a standard way to convert many response time measurements into a single numerical value that always stays within the range of 0 to 1 where 0 is a disaster and 1 is perfect performance delivery. Dozens of vendors measure response time, so you would think you could readily get an Apdex report. Alas it is not so.
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Microsoft CIFS and MAPI-based applications are lousy network citizens, so if you are about to move your Microsoft servers away from users, you should take pre-emptive measures—or buy extra life insurance to ensure your family will be provided for in case of a user mutiny. In a previous post we described the problem.
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Modern life is about speed—rushing to keep up. Your business application had better run fast, faster, fastest. Conventional wisdom dictates that application response time must always be faster. Whatever speed your users experience today, it had better be half that next year. Stop! Think about the consequences.
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When those of us from the network side of the universe think of HP management tools, HP OpenView generally pops to mind. For those of you not in the know, HP OpenView was recently rechristened HP Software.
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At a Gomez users' meeting held after last week's Web Experience Forum, users provided great commentary about how they use Gomez services to ensure good performance-including how they are using Apdex. Imad Mouline, Gomez' CTO, described where all of the Gomez application performance measurement services fit into an application management maturity scale of availability, response time, and consistency (good performance for all users all the time). The Gomez Business Pulse XF portal integrates the views and lev
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This week we ask CA's Wily Technology Division customers to share their in-the-trenches experiences with the CA Wily Customer Experience Manager (CEM) and Introscope performance management tools. As one of the "big four" management vendors, CA expanded its far-reaching IT toolkit into application performance management in 2006 when it acquired Wily Technology for its Introscope software. Today CA Wily claims to manage more web applications for more customers than any other tool vendor.
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For the first time ever, a conference has web designers, business line managers and IT professionals rubbing shoulders in the same venue. It’s about time. The venue was the inaugural Web Experience Forum in Boston this week.
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In this week’s application performance management series we solicit feedback from Compuware customers about their experiences with the Vantage product lineup. Through aggressive acquisition, Compuware has assembled the requisite components to position itself against the “big four” management vendors—IBM, CA, BMC, and HP.
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A few weeks ago the FCC sponsored a panel to discuss how telephone companies and ISPs are preparing to cope with a pandemic. The panelists observed that there will be a lot of congestion in residential access networks (wired and wireless) due to sudden surge in business traffic as people stay home and work remotely. This may surprise you, but the biggest issue in a pandemic is that when parents are home trying to work, their kids will be home coping with boredom, and traffic loads will go th
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This week we turn our spotlight on OPNET customers to gather their opinions of the ACE application performance management solutions they use. Since OPNET is an old timer with thousands of customers ranging from the FDA to GEICO, we anticipate a lively exchange.
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This week we solicit feedback from NetQoS customers about their experiences with the NetQoS Performance Center application performance monitoring solution. NetQoS has its cross hairs trained squarely on the top end of the market—enterprises, service providers, and government entities with the world’s largest networks, and to win these customers over NetQoS has aggressively pursued partnerships and joint marketing with vendor partners, most notably Cisco.
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We are seeking speakers for the third annual Apdex Symposium. The Apdex standard and methodology are supported and promoted by the Apdex Alliance. The 800 alliance members include vendors that support the effort and individuals interested in adopting Apdex within their enterprise. A goal of the alliance is educational outreach and building community around application performance management, and the Apdex Symposium is key to that effort.
The Alliance will hold its third annual Apdex Symposium—a conference within the CMG Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada Tuesday, December 9th. We encourage you to attend, and if you have experience applying Apdex, to share what you have learned as a speaker.
If you have some Apdex data, case studies, examples, products, a home-grown implementation, or ideas about how to improve Apdex--let the rest of the community know. Topics will include, but are not limited to:
The Apdex sessions are always well attended and the feedback is consistently positive. You will only need to provide a 20-minute presentation. No lengthy paper is required! If you are interested, please contact the symposium chair (peter@apdex.org). Take a look at last year's symposium program and presentations at the Apdex website to get a better idea of what it's about. The 2007 Adpex Symposium archive is here.
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NetScout is second up in our series of profiles and user reviews of tools that monitor application performance in real-world environments. NetScout’s stated mission is to optimize performance of networked business applications, and it is especially well suited to do this in large-scale, “applications-are-critical-to-the-business” environments like healthcare and financial services.
Founded in 1984, NetScout’s claim to fame is its ability to gather and make sense of packet flow data from probes permanently embedded in the network—and to do so for huge traffic flow volumes. The nGenius Performance Manager provides monitoring information for more than a thousand applications.
In addition to using its internally developed nGenius probes, in 2007 NetScout acquired Network General for its much loved Sniffer probe technology and is in the process of integrating the two. NetScout applies deep packet inspection to provide visibility into both real-time and historical operational application performance data.
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Last week’s Interop in New York City was eerily normal considering the carnage Wall Street was experiencing just blocks away. Although attendance was modest, vendors told us there were enough qualified and savvy buyers to make the show worthwhile for them. Word is that IT budgets are not being frozen despite economic uncertainty—at least not yet.
The coolness factor of the show was kicked up several notches by the fact that a third of the hall was devoted to Web 2.0-themed exhibitors with names like KickApps, Yuuguu, Kapow Technologies, and Zude. The Web 2.0 portion of the show drew bigger crowds than the “legacy” portion as curious attendees explored new (and opportunistically repositioned) wares. A small portion of the hall was also devoted to Mobile Business Expo, which had a legacy feel to it.
All things virtual featured prominently at this fall’s show, telepresence came into its own, and desktop videoconferencing solutions were prominent. With travel costs skyrocketing, we predict telepresence and desktop video will be up front and center at Interop next spring. Desktop videoconferencing has been around a long time, and may finally be catching on. If so, brace yourselves for a Pandora’s box of enterprise network headaches opened by new infrastructure and large bandwidth demands. The sheer scale of desktop deployments can quickly overload network links and QoS deployments.
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Apdex, the open standard we introduced last week, describes how to report application response time measurements so even business managers can understand. The methodology is measurement-tool agnostic--you can use synthetic agents or measure the real user experience. You can measure in the data center, out on the net, or on the user's desktop. However you gather the data, after an hour or a day you will have thousands of values to work with. Apdex converts all those values into a simple index that allows you to make apples-to-apples performance comparisons across applications.
The process starts with defining a ‘report group' that the index value will represent. This is the first step in reducing vast numbers of measurement samples into a meaningful data subset. Report group parameters may include such things as user group and time of day.
The index is based on three application responsiveness zones:
Satisfied: The user is fully productive. This represents the time value (T seconds) below which users are not impeded by application response time.
Tolerating: The user notices performance lagging within responses greater than T, but continues the process.
Frustrated: Performance with a response time greater than F seconds is unacceptable, and users may abandon the process.
The two thresholds of T (the tolerating threshold, also known as the target time) and F (the frustration threshold) define three performance buckets into which all the samples of a report group can be placed: zero to T, T to F, and >F. The index calculation is a weighted sum of the percentages of samples that fall into each performance zone.
The Apdex formula is the number of satisfied samples plus half of the tolerating samples divided by all the samples. Samples from frustrated users do not count.
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Last week we posted a matrix to make sense of the sea of performance management vendors. This week we begin a series of profiles and user reviews of products in the upper right quadrant of that matrix—tools that monitor application performance in production environments. In coming weeks we will profile all the leading vendors in this quadrant, and we will ask bona fide users to share their experiences to help our readers determine which tools fit their needs. First up is Coradiant.
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Storage makers like EMC who have experienced enviable sales growth for more than a decade may soon find growth slowing for an unexpected reason—Riverbed is about to re-purpose an acceleration technology that has served them well to reduce network traffic, to now take a load off storage servers. How will they do this? They are developing a new box that applies dictionary compression (which they call de-duplication) to permanently reduce the amount of storage space used. The new box, aptly named Atlas, will lift a burden from the server. Here's how it works.
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NetForecast is an internationally recognized engineering consulting company that benchmarks, analyzes, and improves the performance of networked data, voice, and video applications.
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