Why Application Availability Matters And how to achieve increased availability through the use of AppMetrics®

Current Trends in Application Development In order to remain competitive, organizations must build new, mission critical applications that automate and enhance their business processes Consequently, a shift is underway from stovepipe internal applications, to web enabled, transaction-based applications Today off-the-shelf technologies are being used for this custom application development Transaction based application servers for business logic: Microsoft COM+ and Microsoft.NET Serviced Components IBM WebSphere (J2EE) and BEA WebLogic (J2EE) XML Messaging servers for EAI/B2B document interchange: Microsoft BizTalk Server webMethods and IBM MQ Series

The Evolution of the Application Services Stack Over the years, the application stack has evolved considerably Application developers can now rely on standardized, off the shelf technologies instead of painstakingly developing each supporting layer But application availability continues to remain an issue… Platform Evolution : Mainframe Client/Server Web EAI/B2B Web Services Platform Evolution : Mainframe Client/Server Web EAI/B2B Web Services Application System SW Application System SW DBMS Application System SW DBMS Application Server Application System SW DBMS Application Server Integration Server Application System SW DBMS Application Server Application Server Integration Server Integration Server Web Services Application

Why Does Application Availability Even Matter? As business becomes increasingly dependent on technology and information, availability is a universal concern for every business, in every industry… And globalization means there are no more periods of acceptable downtime. At any time of the day or night, somewhere in the world, customers and vendors need access to your corporate information. If they can't get it, they'll go elsewhere – creating an opportunity for your competition. Application Availability: An Approach to Measurement David M. Fishman, Sun Microsystems

An Unavailable Application Negatively Impacts the Business Lost Revenue Poor service leads them to switch to other vendors Lost profit Increased operational costs Lower revenues and profits leads to cost and headcount reductions Leading to fewer resources, increased job pressure, career stagnation IT Developers IT Developers Are responsible for ensuring the application supports the business plan IT Operations IT Operations Are responsible for ensuring availability of the application Employees Rely on the application to process and monitor customer transactions, or facilitate day-to-day operations Whats the Impact of Down-Time? Quantitative & Qualitative Customers and Partners Directly use the application or rely on applications used by your employees to submit or modify business transactions with your organization

The Impact of Down-Time An Internal Business Application Example Industry Financial Services Insurance Application Description Claims Processing Application This application moves and synchronizes data between Microsoft SQL Server, a 3 rd party claims package, and a 3rd party check writing application. Use Characteristics Application Users: 100 to 1,000 Transactions Processed per Day: 1,000 to 10,000 Value per Transaction: $26 to $100 (profit per claim)

A Five Hour Application Outage and Its Ripple EffectEmployees During the outage, claims cannot be processed by the employees – Unfortunately, this is a routine occurrence. 1 Customers Customers As outages continue to occur, customers notice that claims are taking longer to resolve. They are becoming increasingly frustrated, and gradually begin switching to better insurers. 3 Other Parties And, the government starts to assess penalties for the repeated, disproportionate number of claims that do not meet processing deadlines. 4 IT Operations/Development The outage is quickly discovered, but it takes several hours to identify the root cause before the application can be restored for use. 2

As the Application Stack Evolves, So Must Its Manageability Management Products Must Keep Pace With Evolving Requirements Platform Evolution : Mainframe Client/Server Web EAI/B2B Web Services Platform Evolution : Mainframe Client/Server Web EAI/B2B Web Services Application System SW Application System SW DBMS Application System SW DBMS Application Server Application System SW DBMS Application Server Integration Server Application System SW DBMS Application Server Application Server Integration Server Integration Server Web Services Application Memory Management Operating System Management Database and Network Management Application Server Management B2B Control and Business Process Management Web Services Management

What Role Do Management Frameworks and Consoles Play? Their key strength is gathering a broad array of events and metrics (a distributed event manager) from: Operating Systems Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2003 Server, Windows 2008 Server, UNIX, Linux Network Protocols DHCP, DNS, RAS, WINS Microsoft Technologies Active Directory, IIS, Terminal Services, MSCS, MSMQ They are also geared towards managing packaged applications: Microsoft Exchange Server & Lotus Notes Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle 8i, IBM DB2 Siebel CRM, PeopleSoft HR, etc…

How Do You Manage Custom Developed Business Applications? You need to know whats going on underneath your application, in the operating system Management frameworks and consoles do this well Microsoft Operations Manager, BMC Patrol, Tivoli Enterprise, Computer Associates UniCenter TNG, Hewlett-Packard OpenView, NetIQ AppManager But you really need to know whether or not your custom code is successfully transacting the business as intended This is outside their realm of expertise! Even Microsoft is relying on other vendors to provide expert knowledge and tools for complex management problems Which is why, when it comes to managing custom developed business applications, Xtremesofts AppMetrics is the solution

Microsofts View on Systems Management Microsoft Server Operating Sytems Storage Mgmt Security Management Hosting Mgmt Network Mgmt Change Mgmt Base server management provided by Microsoft Value added and other expert management provided by ISVs (like Xtremesoft)

Xtremesofts AppMetrics is a Focused Solution A solution geared towards explicitly managing: COM+ and.NET Serviced Components AppMetrics collects detailed, application specific events and metrics for your custom business applications Aggregates events from multiple underlying technologies Collates them from the perspective of your application Gives you a view that corresponds to your businesses Enables you to measure and maximize a specific custom applications effectiveness and availability

Technologies Packaged Apps System AppMetrics does Events & Metrics for Custom Applications Mission-Critical Management Terminal SvcsActive DirectoryMSMQIISMSDTCDHCP CPUMemoryDiskNetworkFile SystemPrint ExchangeSQLServer Management Tools typically do Events & Metrics for Operating Systems Management Tools typically do Events & Metrics for Technologies Some Management Tools do Events & Metrics for Packaged Applications Custom Developed Apps Custom Developed Applications Your B2C Retail Purchasing Web Site & App (COM+) Your Trading Partner Supply Chain App (BizTalk Server)

What Does This Mean? Traditional management tools are general practitioners They provide cursory information on your application server Information that can tell you that a single server the application is hosted on is non-functional The servers CPU is thrashing, server memory use exceeding 80%, or a server and its application has crashed Often too late, and unable to answer the real question, Why? Xtremesoft AppMetrics is the specialist It can diagnose and pinpoint Why? and do so proactively An applications CPU or memory use exceeding threshold, a designated kind of transaction taking too long, a particular component is aborting, a components method accessing a database repeatedly hangs And on a per application basis, across a server farm, not just per server And give you detailed reporting for capacity planning and analysis

Custom Application Key Business Events & Metrics Traditional management tools and frameworks wont tell you about business transactions: Shopping cart transaction count? Purchase order approval duration? Credit card approval abort count? Invoice transmission failed? (Show it be automatically resubmitted?) These are your front office business transactions, and represent real dollars and opportunities Not your back office infrastructure! You need to manage both!

Business Value $$$ Whats the Value to You? System Operating System Management tools typically tell you that disks are spinning, CPUs arent pegged, network packets are flowing… System Technology Management tools typically tell you DHCP, DNS, Active Directory, WINS, and MSMQ, are up and running… System Packaged Applications Some kinds of management tools let you know SQL Server database records are being written and Exchange Server works… System Custom Applications AppMetrics lets you know that the business process logic implemented in your custom application is transacting successfully… (or not!)

How Does that Value Translate into Real Money? By using AppMetrics, the availability of the application has increased by a few percentage points. Considering for every one percentage point of additional availability a thousand man-hours of down-time is saved and hence results in millions of dollars in improved efficiency throughout the organization.

Maximize the availability of your applications on the Microsoft platform