Effective application performance management with Didata solution

As South African companies embrace e-commerce, it is vital that business critical applications perform at their peak. This is easy enough to say, but harder to put into practice.

"Application performance management is a problem," says Jannie van Zyl, executive: managed solutions, Dimension Data Network Services. "This is confirmed by the three different approaches vendors have taken to produce solutions."

Van Zyl says one solution involves incorporating special delimiting code within applications to be managed so that the time between certain events can be easily measured. "This solution is great for the future, assuming every developer agrees to implement a standardised method," he says. "However, legacy applications will be left out of the system unless they are somehow rewritten."

Another solution is to sample or generate synthetic data flows and use them as a yardstick for performance, as network variables change. Van Zyl says this method is good for indicating whether performance is up to par, but it may not be particularly useful at revealing the causes of performance difficulties.

The third method involves identifying certain triggers or `signatures` that mark the beginning and end of transactions or other software processes, and then measuring time based on these indicators.

Dimension Data provides solutions that maximise the performance and availability of the e-business infrastructure. One of the elements, that uses a form of the third method, is FirstSense Enterprise, an offering from Dimension Data`s partner, performance management specialists Concord Communications.

With FirstSense Enterprise, clients are outfitted with lightweight agents that capture performance data and pass it along to a management console. Detailed analyses of such widespread critical applications as SAP, Oracle Apps, PeopleSoft, Lotus Notes, and Microsoft Exchange/ Outlook are available with FirstSense Enterprise.

In addition, Web-based applications, Windows applications, and other custom applications can be managed by the FirstSense agent.

"FirstSense Enterprise adds an important dimension to the Concord Communications` line-up offered by Dimension Data," says van Zyl.

Concord`s Network Health line of performance management products focuses on lower-layer network monitoring, while its Empire products focus on server and server OS monitoring.

In combination, Dimension Data`s Concord` offering provides a strong end-to-end, seven-layer performance management solution.