Adaptive Management to Achieve
Java Application Service Levels
© Copyright Quest®Software, Inc. 2007. All rights reserved.
This guide contains proprietary information, which is protected by copyright. The software described in this guide is furnished under a software license or nondisclosure agreement. This software may be used or copied only in accordance with the terms of the applicable agreement. No part of this guide may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording for any purpose other than the purchaser's personal use without the written permission of Quest Software, Inc.
WARRANTY
The information contained in this document is subject to change without notice. Quest Software makes no warranty of any kind with respect to this information. QUEST SOFTWARE SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS THE IMPLIED WARRANTY OF THE MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Quest Software shall not be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, consequential, or other damage alleged in connection with the furnishing or use of this information.
TRADEMARKS
All trademarks and registered trademarks used in this guide are property of their respective owners. World Headquarters 5 Polaris Way Aliso Viejo, CA 92656 www.quest.com e-mail: [email protected]
U.S. and Canada: 949.754.8000
Please refer to our Web site for regional and international office information.
C
ONTENTS
INTRODUCTION... 1
THE JAVA APPLICATION OPERATING ENVIRONMENT... 2
CHALLENGES IN MANAGING JAVA APPLICATIONS ... 4
THE SOLUTION TO MEET JAVA APPLICATION SERVICE LEVELS ... 5
PROACTIVE MONITORING TO IDENTIFY APPLICATION ISSUES BEFORE END USERS ARE AFFECTED ... 7
CUSTOMIZABLE DASHBOARDS TO PROVIDE ROLE-BASED VIEWS ... 9
ACCELERATING INCIDENT AND PROBLEM MANAGEMENT IN REAL TIME ... 11
ISOLATING BOTTLENECKS AFFECTING APPLICATION PERFORMANCE ...12
MINIMIZING DISRUPTIONS TO DEVELOPMENT...14
FLEXIBLE REPORTING TO KEEP STAKEHOLDERS INFORMED ...15
ACHIEVING APPLICATION SERVICE LEVELS FROM END USER TO DATABASE ... 16
CONCLUSION... 17
REFERENCES... 18
ABOUT THE AUTHOR... 19
ABOUT QUEST SOFTWARE, INC. ... 20
CONTACTING QUEST SOFTWARE...20
I
NTRODUCTION
Java is the leading technology platform for building customer-facing, revenue-generating applications, as well as internal applications that are critical to business operations. The importance of the applications and services that leverage Java technology necessitate a management strategy. Business risks related to the applications and services that support business initiatives fall into two categories: complexity and continuous change.
Applications and services implemented with Java have become more distributed, which increases complexity. This complexity is driven by the need to add new functionality for business initiatives. As the business drives adoption of these applications and services, which in turn increases user volumes and transactions, greater capacity and additional complexities are introduced.
Business is in a perpetual state of change, and as IT aligns with the business, it must adapt to this change, at least as fast—if not faster—than the business. Many of the same forces that drive complexity also drive change. But in addition to new functionality and heavier user volumes, application consolidation and integration projects—driven by cost savings or as a result of mergers and acquisitions—compound the situation.
T
HE
J
AVA
A
PPLICATION
O
PERATING
E
NVIRONMENT
Java applications and Web services operate in a layered environment with many dependencies for a single application instance, as depicted in Figure 1. Java applications run in an application server that runs in a Java Runtime Environment or Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Supporting them is an operating system and associated hardware.
Figure 1. The Java application operating environment
C
HALLENGES IN
M
ANAGING
J
AVA
A
PPLICATIONS
IT organizations typically lack a strategy for managing their business-critical Java applications and Web services for performance degradations and availability issues. Many take a reactive stance, only implementing application management strategies once application failures occur or revenue is lost. The reasons for this stem from constrained IT budgets, the use of inadequate management solutions, or the reliance on the development organization to build management features into the application.
A common practice that falls short is relying on a tool that primarily monitors the operating system or specific process performance. The shortcoming with this practice is that such a tool cannot detect performance problems that end users actually experience. Furthermore, application failures can occur in a Java application or Web service without affecting the host server or the operating system.
The result is that end users call to complain about application availability and performance, instead of the monitoring systems discovering issues in advance. Research conducted by Forrester reveals that 50 percent of service
disruptions are reported by end users and not by management solutions1.
Analyzing these disruptions often leads to finger pointing, wasted resources, and long resolution times which run counter to the goals of service management.
T
HE
S
OLUTION TO
M
EET
J
AVA
A
PPLICATION
S
ERVICE
L
EVELS
Leading organizations are taking a proactive approach to address the complex challenges of managing distributed Java application environments. They are seeking the following capabilities to drive Java application service levels:
• Customizable dashboards to provide a role-based view of application health status and role-specific workflows for problem diagnosis • Monitoring of Java applications to discover application issues (e.g.,
performance degradations and failures)
• Accelerated incident management through proactive alerting of application issues before end users report problems
• Method of informing the IT support staff member with the right expertise to diagnose and resolve application issues
• Powerful diagnostic features to accelerate the problem-management process, quickly drive root-cause analysis and reduce resolution time in production environments
• A way to leverage development resources for added value, versus involving them in diagnosing problems, debugging code, and supporting production
• Seamless integration with the IT operational and development environments to streamline workflow
• Deployment of a single solution to proactively address custom
application and Web service performance and availability issues across the application infrastructure, from the end user to the database
Foglight proactively monitors Java applications and Web services for performance and availability issues to discover issues before end users call the service desk. The problem management process is accelerated by Foglight’s collection of real-time diagnostic data, which empowers the appropriate IT expert to quickly resolve application problems.
P
ROACTIVE
M
ONITORING
T
O
I
DENTIFY
A
PPLICATION
I
SSUES
B
EFORE
E
ND
U
SERS
A
RE
A
FFECTED
Foglight provides proactive monitoring for performance degradations and exceptions that can adversely affect the end-user experience. Collecting these events and communicating them to the appropriate IT staff is critical to effectively managing applications.
Many levels of detail are available to view application health, and overall system health can be monitored from the server domain in which the application is deployed.
Alerts specifically for a defined service can be viewed from the service dashboard, shown in Figure 4. From this dashboard, you can drill down into the components of the service requests to determine which one has generated the alert.
The dashboard allows you to drill down even deeper to view the status of the particular application, such as an individual EJB or web component, as shown in Figure 4.
C
USTOMIZABLE
D
ASHBOARDS
T
O
P
ROVIDE
R
OLE
-B
ASED
V
IEWS
With Foglight, you can create role-based views of the managed environment. Administrators can use a targeted view to include specific details of items of interest, while architects can opt for a more holistic view.
Foglight enables this flexibility so you can create views to align application and services performance with specific business goals, while measuring operating levels against service level agreements (SLAs) that support them.
Figure 5. A user portlet “Medical Record Application Performance” created by drag-and-drop functionality
A
CCELERATING
I
NCIDENT AND
P
ROBLEM
M
ANAGEMENT
I
N
R
EAL
T
IME
When it comes to ensuring customer satisfaction and maintaining a solid production environment, organizations often face three main obstacles:
• The time spent resolving issues is too long, which can lead to user abandonment or dissatisfaction
• Finding the root cause of complex or repeated problems is
time-consuming and difficult, which exposes the production environment to continual problems
• The inability to control changes in production adds unnecessary risk and can make compliance difficult to achieve
Foglight spans the lifecycle from production to development, so you can prevent incidents in the environment and respond quickly and effectively to those that do arise. This requires effective communication among the key players from both the production and development organizations.
Developers and architects are often under pressure to create more applications and better services. Therefore, Quest provides tuning tools for applications and databases that can be used when developing and unit-testing new code or SQL. This helps these groups optimize performance, scalability and resource usage.
When applications are handed over for QA testing, they undergo performance and scalability testing, in addition to functional testing. Quest’s solutions can be used to gather deeper, more targeted performance and scalability information on those tests in a way that is completely transparent to the QA workflow and processes that are already in place. This includes the ability to see run-to-run performance and resource-demand changes granularly—or line-level—which can highlight the areas of an application or service that are improving with each milestone and those that are slipping behind.
Isolating Bottlenecks Affecting Application
Performance
Because today’s applications are highly distributed, it can be difficult to identify and isolate performance issues in a particular component of the application infrastructure.
The Java requests page of Foglight in Figure 6 shows details on individual requests. From here, you can drill down into data about a particular request that is performing slowly to identify the bottleneck in the transaction.
Figure 6. Request dashboard
A unique feature of Foglight is its ability to show you trace information for a single transaction. You can view the execution path for a single request, not
Figure 7. The Foglight Java management request details view
In the previous case, the problem was in the Java code. However, Foglight’s single trace feature also helps manage performance issues related to SQL statements that are executed as part of the request, as well.
Figure 8. A Java request details view with SQL variables
Minimizing Disruptions to Development
Minimizing application downtime and time-to-repair is critical to meeting service goals. Discovering these incidents in real time, and collecting the appropriate diagnostic data to allow for efficient problem resolution, is essential for minimizing disruptions to development.
Flexible Reporting to Keep Stakeholders Informed
Reporting is a key requirement for proactive problem management and to help prevent performance and availability issues. Foglight has many reporting options you can leverage to learn about trends in application performance and availability events. Identifying application “hot spots” facilitates effective communication between IT operations staff and the development team to address particularly problematic areas of an application. The development team can devote additional resources to ensure that these hot spots are addressed to prevent application problems.
A
CHIEVING
A
PPLICATION
S
ERVICE
L
EVELS
F
ROM
E
ND
U
SER
T
O
D
ATABASE
IT organizations often lack a holistic view of their application environment. This presents challenges when trying to identify the root cause of performance and availability issues across the application infrastructure, from the end-user to the database. Without an end-to-end view, it’s difficult to pinpoint where problems really exists—whether they’re in the network, the application server, the database or the application code itself.
Some of the major challenges IT organizations face are:
• IT teams that work in silos, claiming all is well even when users report problems;
• IT teams that can’t identify the impact of planned and unplanned changes on an IT environment or essential business services
• Poor end-user satisfaction due to performance and availability issues The root of these challenges stems from the way the various tiers and domains are monitored. Most of the time, this is done through silo-based management, an approach that prevents IT teams from getting a cohesive, end-to-end view of the application’s performance.
The Quest Foglight solution provides such a view from the end user to the database. It measures the end-user experience, which can act as a leading indicator of a problem. The value this offers is that the IT team can proactively look into a problem before it grows in severity. Foglight provides:
• Correlated data that gives a single view of the true issues to speed inter-group resolution
• Service dependency mapping that shows linkages between users, services and infrastructure to allow for planning or prioritization • Individual end-user traces to show the problems in context and to
enable targeted resolution
C
ONCLUSION
Java applications are critical to the success of many businesses. Thus, protecting the business and ensuring its growth requires an effective solution to manage Java applications. Constant change and increasing application complexity compound the need for effective management solutions. The ability to efficiently and accurately discover, diagnose and resolve application performance and availability issues mitigates the risk to the business and minimizes the impact of poorly performing applications.
Foglight can help you deliver on application service levels with proactive monitoring capabilities. It also allows you to optimize the application support process by providing detailed diagnostic information in real-time. Additionally, Foglight informs the IT organization of events and trends in application performance issues.
To learn more about Foglight, please visit
R
EFERENCES
1. Forrester Research, Inc., Managing IT as a Service: A Federated
A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR
Steve Stover is a Group Product Manager for Application Management
Solutions for Quest Software. Steve oversees the product strategy, functionality and go-to-market activities of the company’s application and services management solutions, which include Foglight.
A
BOUT
Q
UEST
S
OFTWARE
,
I
NC
.
Quest Software, Inc. delivers innovative products that help organizations get more performance and productivity from their applications, databases and Windows infrastructure. Through a deep expertise in IT operations and a continued focus on what works best, Quest helps more than 50,000 customers worldwide meet higher expectations for enterprise IT. Quest’s Windows Management solutions simplify, automate and secure Active Directory, Exchange and Windows, as well as integrate Unix and Linux into the managed environment. Quest Software can be found in offices around
the globe and at www.quest.com.
Contacting Quest Software
Phone: 949.754.8000 (United States and Canada)
Email: [email protected]
Mail: Quest Software, Inc.
World Headquarters
5 Polaris Way
Aliso Viejo, CA 92656
USA
Web site: www.quest.com
Please refer to our Web site for regional and international office information.
Contacting Quest Support
Quest Support is available to customers who have a trial version of a Quest product or who have purchased a commercial version and have a valid maintenance contract. Quest Support provides around-the-clock coverage with SupportLink, our self-service web site. Visit SupportLink at
http://support.quest.com
From SupportLink, you can do the following:
• Quickly find thousands of solutions (Quest knowledgebase articles/documents).
