Prepare for Web services with application performance management

In today`s tough economy, there is continuing pressure to find cost reduction opportunities even on legacy technology investments.

Concurrent with this, says Salome Kwant, mainframe product manager at Compuware SA, is the emergence of new technologies that must co-exist with old - notably portal and Web services that draw on mainframe resources.

Mainframes deliver solid, predictable value year after year, and hence the relevance of the technology remains undiminished. Mainframe functions are routinely folded into client/server and Internet applications through Web services technologies such as IBM`s Websphere and BEA`s Weblogic.

"To deliver added value and maintain their competitive-edge, many organisations are compelled to consider, and in many cases deploy, Web services and portal technologies," says Kwant. She explains that these initiatives essentially allow mainframe applications to be accessed through the Internet via a Web front-end.

An example of this type of application could be customers and trading partners accessing the services at their own time and speed. But this increases pressure on mainframe resources, making it critical for all applications accessing the mainframe to be optimised in order to deliver acceptable performance around the clock.

However, in taking mainframe services to the Internet, companies face the risk of seriously degrading the performance of existing - and new - applications. "A viable solution would be to implement an integrated application performance management (APM) solution. This allows companies to tune their programs in order to reduce costs, delay hardware upgrades and regain processing power by optimising new and existing systems for the environment in which they run," explains Kwant.

This can essentially release mainframe resources for incipient Web services and portal technologies.

According to Kwant, effective APM is an ongoing activity and not a project, and must have appropriate technology coupled with procedure and personnel to support the process. "You need to develop expertise, acquire tools and establish practices for managing application performance that mesh with development and operations,` she says.

Compuware`s solutions provide the underlying technology for an APM solution, with tools for measuring activity and resource consumption, automating the collection and analysis of performance data, and providing access to such data through a Web interface.

"When taking applications to the Web, it is critical that these perform at acceptable levels, or the investment made to make these programs accessible through the Internet may be wasted. APM can effectively reduce the demands on the mainframe, making capacity available to serve new requests, and obviating the need for costly and disruptive hardware upgrades," concludes Kwant.