Manage application performance

Beyond troubleshooting, you can help your business gain productivity and save costs by applying a complete service management lifecycle to application performance:

• Performance assessment
• Defining relevant service levels
• Monitoring performance and providing automated reporting
• Proactive performance optimization

Monitor end user experience

Performance Vision can provide a continuous view of the end user experience compared to your organization’s service levels. This information can be displayed or provided as reports distributed by email. With this information you can provide your users with complete transparency on the performance of your applications.

Optimize performance

Performance Vision provides key statistics to understand the behavior of applications; based on relevant data, you can:

Optimize network application delivery

There are many possible ways to optimize application delivery on a network: adding network capacity, flow prioritization or compression, thin clients… The same thinking may apply to host optimization like client or server configuration, or resource allocation.

To determine the most efficient and cost effective way to deliver an application in your context, you need to be aware of the weight of each performance driver on the end user experience. Unless you have access to such data, you take the risk of investing time and money in solutions that cannot bring the expected benefit.

Manage the SLA of your application vendors

Unless you can provide concrete and impartial information about the performance of your applications, your application vendors will first blame your infrastructure (network or server) for any performance defect of their application in your environment. You need clear facts on the actual performance levels, on the origin of the degradation and the type of transactions that are impacted, to hold them accountable for the resolution and to help them qualify where the issue comes from.

This way, you can help your application partners improve the service they render to your organization.

Managing migrations and deployments

IT teams have to make sure they are ready to cope with changes and new uses of their infrastructure. The risks attached to the deployment of new applications or migrations in the infrastructure (application upgrades, datacenter migrations...) can have a huge impact on business productivity. Making sure the infrastructure is ready to deal smoothly with new applications and infrastructure is part of the duties of the administration team; on the other hand, as budgets have to remain under control, it is also important for the network manager not to over-invest in capacities.

Migrations and deployments are challenges for an IT team: the team is often under pressure to deliver the new application on time. The behavior of a new application in a production environment at a large scale is not fully foreseeable. Often such applications represent large investments and the expectations of business users are set high.

Being able to prepare the migration, run the preproduction phase and switch to production correctly is key to making a migration or a deployment a success and requires a certain number of capabilities such as listed below:

Discover application chains

Before any migration, it is highly important to understand how an application chain works:

• What are the different servers and services which are part of the application chain?
• What are the main performance drivers in the application chain?

Performance Vision provides you with a complete view of the application chain, so that you can keep the migration under control and avoid performance degradations due to an incomplete / inadequate process.

Understand the network requirements for a new application or version

Before deploying a new application or version, Performance Vision helps you determine the network prerequisites for a good application quality of service:

• Understanding the bandwidth required: understanding how much bandwidth is required for the new application can help plan capacities to guarantee the good quality of service for the application and avoid overinvesting in network capabilities;
• Sensitivity to network conditions: depending on the way the application works, it may be more or less sensitive to latency or packet loss. Depending on this information, you may invest in specific network connections or not.

Track performance rates before / after migration

Performance Vision keeps track of performance before, during and after the migration. This way you can:

• React faster in case of degradation;
• Prove the quality and control of the migration;
• Show the performance improvement provided by the migration.