Application Performance Management (APM) for TIBCO...

White Paper

Application Performance Management (APM) for TIBCO® Users

Extending Visibility Across Your TIBCO Infrastructure and Beyond Publication Date: May 2009 Abstract: TIBCO users may wish to expand IT monitoring and management beyond their TIBCO infrastructure. Many SL customers have chosen to extend their TIBCO monitoring and visualization application to a broader Application Performance Management (APM) solution, delivering single-pane-of-glass visibility across their heterogeneous application and IT infrastructure.

APM focuses on monitoring and managing the performance and service availability of software applications. Enterprise companies are increasingly seeking holistic, or 360˚, APM solutions, capable of monitoring and managing a broad range of applications, in order to:

• Provide early detection/preventative care relating to application issues to

reduce the number of trouble tickets. • Determine root cause more quickly and have the power to fix a problem

then-and-there in order to reduce the MTTR (mean time to repair) and minimize impact on customer experience, SLAs and revenue.

• Deliver a comprehensive, integrated solution that reduces overall TCO and makes the goal – end-to-end application monitoring and control – attainable.

Application Performance Management for TIBCO Users 2

Copyright

© 2009 Sherrill-Lubinski Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Trademarks SL Corporation, SL-GMS RTView, RTView, and the SL logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sherrill-Lubinski Corporation in the United States and other countries. TIBCO, the TIBCO logo, The Power of Now, Hawk, Rendezvous, Enterprise Message Service, PortalBuilder, Integration Manager, SmartSockets, ActivePortal and TIB are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of TIBCO Software, Inc. in the United States and other countries. They are mentioned in this document for identification purposes only.


Contents

Introduction ...................................................................................................... 4

Application Performance Management Solutions .............................................. 5

The Challenge ................................................................................................... 5

The Value of APM .............................................................................................. 6

Service Performance Management ............................................................... 6

Capacity Planning ...................................................................................... 7

Chargeback or Service Usage Analysis .......................................................... 7

Required Functionality for an Effective APM Solution ........................................ 7

How Enterprise RTView Delivers APM for TIBCO Users ..................................... 8

Access to All Critical Service Metrics ............................................................. 8

Define the Hierarchy and Rules of a Business Service Model ............................ 8

Supply Real-Time Analytic Processing of the Service Metrics Against the ........... 9

Archive Analytic Processing for Historical Comparisons................................... 10

Allow Definition of Automated Behavior Based on Rules ................................. 10

Provide Configurable Dashboards for Summary and Drilldown Service Views ..... 10

Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 14

About SL Corporation ...................................................................................... 15


Introduction

RTView™ for TIBCO is a software application developed by SL Corporation that enables

users to leverage their TIBCO investment by dramatically enhancing visibility into their

infrastructure. RTView provides a flexible, configurable, out-of-the-box solution to help

enterprises optimize their monitoring of TIBCO Enterprise Message Service™, TIBCO

Hawk® and TIBCO Rendezvous® applications by visually presenting real-time and

archived data from the TIBCO Information Bus (TIB) and other data sources, all without

programming.

TIBCO users may wish

to expand application

monitoring and

management beyond

their TIBCO

infrastructure. Many SL

customers have chosen

to extend their TIBCO

monitoring and

visualization solution to

a broader Application

Performance

Management (APM)

solution, delivering

single-pane-of-glass

visibility across their

heterogeneous application

infrastructure.

The purpose of this whitepaper is to review a number of ways TIBCO users are able to

manage the performance of TIBCO, packaged, and custom applications by extending

visibility beyond their TIBCO infrastructure to other data sources and applications,

thereby delivering a comprehensive APM solution.

RTView provides out-of-box functionality for monitoring and administering TIBCO applications


Application Performance Management Solutions

Application Performance Management, or APM, focuses on monitoring and managing the

performance and service availability of software applications. Demand for a new

generation of APM products is being driven out of a frustration with earlier solutions that

either only focus on a narrow slice of monitoring, or have cobbled together monitoring

tools through acquisition, and therefore cannot provide a single interface to the end-to-

end performance of an application.

The Challenge

In the last ten years, systems management tools have become essential to every large

IT organization, providing a certain level of single-pane–of-glass visibility for network

and systems management needs. Level 1 operation support teams use these integrated

tools to recognize when applications or IT components are failing and provide automated

responses and trouble ticket management. The downside with these systems is that they

are component-based and cannot measure or determine any potential business impact

of a particular component failure. This makes it very difficult to determine how to

prioritize problem resolution or whom to notify in the event of service impact.

Technical Service teams – whose responsibility it is to maintain the performance of

individual IT infrastructure components – and Application Support teams are often the

level 2 and level 3 support groups that try to cobble together a variety of off-the-shelf

and home-grown monitoring tools to determine business impact. This is done with the

goal of understanding how to best respond to trouble tickets related to their systems.

These “tools” may range from applications that monitor middleware, transactions,

application servers, JVMs, and databases, to reams of server log files that must be

manually reviewed. In large organizations, this has given rise to hundreds of

dashboards and folklore about best practices for troubleshooting service problems.

Many organizations now realize that they must standardize around a common and

comprehensive 360˚ single-pane–of-glass visibility solution for application performance

management to make any sense of the large amount of real-time data available, and to

reduce costs for maintenance and training associated with continuing their traditional

practices. They need early detection/preventative care to reduce the number of trouble

tickets. They need to determine root cause more quickly and have the power to fix a


problem then-and-there in order to reduce the MTTR (mean time to repair) and

minimize impact on customer experience, SLAs and revenue. And they need a

comprehensive, integrated solution that reduces overall TCO and makes the goal – end-

to-end application monitoring and control – attainable.

In addition to getting pressure to reduce the number of trouble tickets and MTTR,

application support teams are also being asked to provide line-of-business stakeholders

with visibility into performance management as it relates to business objectives. They

also have pressure from the CIO to manage toward ITIL standards for Incident

Management, Availability, Capacity and Service Level Management.

The Value of APM

APM has a wide audience of potential users in an organization who can benefit from

visibility into application and component metrics including:

• Operations • Application Support Teams • Technical Services • Development • Key Business Stakeholders • Service End Users

Once given a customizable view of applications and the infrastructure metrics that effect

those applications, many people in these roles quickly find a wide variety of key

initiatives that can be implemented to increase performance, optimize expenditures and

reduce costs. Three of the most common initiatives are Service Performance

Management, Capacity Planning, and Usage Analysis.

Service Performance Management

Service Performance Management is the reason that most organizations initially place

APM as a high priority for IT investment. This may be because there are well-defined

internal or external SLAs that need to be monitored, or because the IT group is

measured by its ability to reduce both the number of incidents and trouble ticket

response times. Unfortunately, many companies wait until service downtimes have

resulted in huge losses in either direct revenue or penalties before the implementation of

an APM solution is made a top priority. In either case, it is just as important to look at


trends and have proactive measures for predicting and preventing an incident as it is to

have automated and rapid analysis and drilldown to reduce response times.

Capacity Planning

Organizations generally have mandates to forecast potential growth and then optimally

prepare and allocate the necessary resources. By archiving and analyzing the historical

usage of IT components as related to a particular application, it is possible to have the

detailed information necessary to fine tune required expenditures and increase

confidence that service levels will be met for the forecasted growth.

Chargeback or Service Usage Analysis

Managing IT costs can be difficult when trying to manage applications for a wide variety

of business units. Many enterprises are leveraging APM to enforce a chargeback policy

so that IT costs can be tracked as a line-of-business expenditure. However, even if an

organization does not want to introduce detailed chargeback analysis for usage of IT

services by a department of business unit, great benefits can be found in understanding

those usage levels. Questions such as, “Are my IT expenditures in-line with my strategic

business initiatives?” or “Why is this particular business unit showing such an increase in

usage?” can be answered.

Required Functionality for an Effective APM Solution

Any enterprise-class APM solution must contain these component features to be effective

and have the ability to address expanding business and IT alignment initiatives.

• Access to all critical application and component-level metrics

• Definition of a service model

• Real-time analytic processing of infrastructure metrics against the service model

• Ability to archive service model metrics for analysis

• Define automated response to alert conditions

• Provide configurable dashboards and reports


How RTView Delivers APM for TIBCO Users

SL's RTView platform is uniquely positioned to service the requirements of 360˚ APM

because 1) it has the ability to provide a single, real-time view into complex, multi-

tier applications with historical context, 2) it was developed from the ground up as

an integrated system, enabling seamless analysis across applications and layers, and

drill-down capabilities to pinpoint root cause and initiate repair, and 3) it is a flexible

environment for the creation of holistic application service views that is easy and

non-invasive to integrate, and cost-effective to deploy and maintain.

Access to All Critical Application and Component-Level Metrics

RTView provides access to the critical TIBCO infrastructure metrics from TIBCO EMS,

TIBCO Hawk, TIBCO Rendezvous and TIBCO BusinessWorks. However, TIBCO users

may have other metrics that are relevant to the performance of the applications such

as status information from application servers, databases, networks, and specialized

monitoring agents and systems such as HP OpenView, Microsoft MOM, Oracle

Enterprise Manager, Symantec i3 or other systems. These metrics can be made

available via a variety of RTView data adapters including JMX, SQL, SNMP, Splunk or

custom data adapters.

Define the Hierarchy and Rules of a Service Model

The Service Model is a hierarchical definition which starts from the low-level

infrastructure metrics and bubbles up to define intermediate infrastructure

components that then define the health and performance of a particular application.

Using the RTView Alert Management System, users can define these Service Models

which can then be used to drive dashboards and reports, allowing them to look at

top-level Service status and drill down to their applicable metrics.


Definition of the service model

To facilitate the creation of the Service Model, alert templates can be defined and

parameterized. For example, perhaps a generic status template could be created to

model BusinessWorks and then multiple BusinessWorks instances could use the

same template.

Supply Real-Time Analytic Processing of the Service Metrics Against the

Service Model

Once the Service Model is defined, it is then loaded into the RTView Server. The

Server continually performs the calculations necessary to determine the state of the

Service Model by applying the current values of the infrastructure metrics in real

time. Any layer of the Service Model can be enabled or disabled, and thresholds for

alert rules can be modified at runtime without re-loading the Service Model definition.

This is often important, for example, when certain parts of the IT service structure

need to be brought down for maintenance while others remain live, and when

unusual circumstances require that alert thresholds be temporarily modified to

reduce a deluge of alarms.


Archive Analytic Processing for Historical Comparisons

The RTView Historian provides the perfect solution for archiving application metrics by

allowing you to select any level of the Service Model and save time-stamped metrics in

the relational database of your choice. This data can then be used in dashboards that

allow you to perform activities such as analyzing performance trends, performing

dynamic baseline alerting, managing capacity planning, or providing an audit-trail report.

Allow Definition of Automated Behavior Based on Rules

Any layer of the Service Model can define automated behavior based on its state. That

behavior might be to send an email; write a log entry to a database; or invoke a Hawk

method, a system script, or a variety of other actions including custom commands which

can be written using a Java API.

Provide Configurable Dashboards for Summary and Drilldown Service Views

Many APM solutions only allow for a fixed path to drill down through a series of colored

circles to diagnose a performance problem. This often results in only a very few, highly

trained operations staff who can truly be effective at getting what they need out of the

solution. It also means that most solutions have a pre-conceived and limited notion of

the parameters and initiatives that may need to be addressed once a wider audience

gains access to application management.

RTView allows for the creation of complete, customizable RIAs (Rich Internet

Applications) that can specifically address custom APM initiatives. These RIAs can be

created quite simply without programming using the RTView Builder. This means that

application support specialists can gather requirements from business and development

teams and proceed to implement the solution without having to be experts in Adobe Flex,

AJAX, or any of the other shifting popular Web development environments.

Though it is obvious that drilling down through trees of colored circles would not be an

effective way to perform capacity planning or usage analysis, it should be noted that it

is also not very efficient for looking at application performance. Support teams, business

stakeholders and end users all have very different ways that they want to look at

application performance.


For example, a top-level view of the services supported by various applications of an

organization might show a physical view of those services against a map.

Top-level physical service view

Another top-level view might show a heat map of the different TIBCO BusinessWorks

processes running on a server with visualization of process memory and CPU utilization


Or, a top-level view might show a logical view of the application that shows relationships

between dependent components.

Top-level logical service view

A drill down from an application could be to a detailed and very specialized panel that

shows key metrics from various infrastructure components that support that application,

in this case TIBCO BusinessWorks and TIBCO Enterprise Message Service.

Key metrics supporting an application


The underlying infrastructure metrics can also be specialized and interactive so that the

operator can drill down and look at different slices of the infrastructure data to quickly

diagnose problems.

Detailed infrastructure metrics

SL’s RTView has a broad appeal as a 360˚ APM solution, regardless of what stage an

organization is at in delivering against APM requirements.

• For organizations that do not already have an APM solution, RTView can monitor

and report on all aspects of the application environment and provide immediate

value to application development, engineering teams, as well as operations and

management teams;

• For organizations that already have tools to monitor components of the

application infrastructure, RTView can fill the monitoring gaps that exist, as well

as provide an overall analytics engine for the events, an alerts/rules engine, and

a robust presentation layer if desired;

• For organizations that already have monitoring tools and an overall enterprise

management system, RTView can perform the tough job of aggregating

application data and pinpointing the root cause of the application problem.


Conclusion

To be competitive today, companies need to be agile and responsive to the shifting daily

needs of customers, internal operations, sales channels, and marketing. The complex

architecture required to support these business processes means that important

business information can reside in a variety of disparate locations. Each role in the

enterprise needs its own specialized, aggregated set of that information to make timely

business decisions for their areas of responsibility. Requirements within the enterprise

can change daily and necessitate that each group of inter-related job roles be able to

configure views into that data and distribute that information to their colleagues,

suppliers or customers.

RTView provides TIBCO users with a cost-effective, quickly implemented, and flexible

solution for aggregating disparate enterprise data and delivering a complete 360˚ APM

solution. RTView is unique because it can provide value both as a holistic APM platform,

as well as a point APM solution focused on specific application monitoring. It does so

through a robust set of monitoring capabilities that can directly monitor application

performance data, or integrate existing sources of data from other application

monitoring solutions. With all of the data in a single information layer, RTView provides

comprehensive analysis functionality, alerts and rules, and can easily construct an

overall service model of application performance. This performance data may include

middleware, network performance data, application servers, log files or just about any

other source of information. With the models developed, RTView’s information layer can

forward the information to its own presentation layer, or process “intelligent events” that

will help identify the root cause of the performance issue via an enterprise manager of

managers.

With RTView, enterprise infrastructure information can not only be configured to just

monitor a specific sub-system of the enterprise, but also tailored to fit a specific

business role and provide daily information tailored to the needs of that role. The

information is there. Making it immediately accessible in an easily interpreted form

dramatically enhances business practices.


About SL Corporation Over the past 24 years, SL Corporation has become the most knowledgeable and

responsive provider of real-time monitoring, analytics, and visibility solutions. SL’s

flagship product, RTView, addresses a broad spectrum of operational visibility challenges

spanning application performance management (APM), business activity monitoring

(BAM), and component-level infrastructure monitoring. RTView also has become the de

facto standard for extending the visualization of complex event processing (CEP) engines,

TIBCO messaging middleware, Oracle Coherence data grids, and custom applications.

SL’s exclusive focus on real-time visibility solutions, commitment to customer success,

and partner-centric culture are why thousands of industry leaders have chosen to work

with SL to support their most critical applications and businesses. SL Corporation can be

reached at +1 415-927-8400 or on the web at www.sl.com.

Contact Information SL Corporation 240 Tamal Vista Blvd. Corte Madera, CA 94925 +1 415-927-8400 [email protected] For more information regarding RTView for TIBCO, please visit: www.sl.com

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