You can call me a realist if you want, but I am not one enamored with the fantasy of a great and Wonderful Wizard of Oz. When the wizard tried to get Dorothy Gale and her friends to ignore what he was doing behind the curtain, he was hiding the truth from them. The truth of the matter is, the wizard was just a man, but everyone thought he was someone else. Yes, Dorothy and her friends were very happy to seek the great Wonderful Wizard thinking he had the answers to their desires. But, for the whole of the story, they were chasing after the wrong thing. It wasn’t until the end that they discovered the true wizard was just a man from Nebraska.
Don’t we do the same thing when we are monitoring our application data flows? Our Application Performance Management tool tells us where the bottlenecks are in our transactional data flows, but is it always that simple? For example, we think we know the root of our application performance problem when the database response times are getting longer, but we later find the real problem is in the infrastructure that hosts the database. It is time we look behind the curtain or our APM tool to see the infrastructure that is there.
Server Performance monitoring tools like CA Unified Infrastructure Management (CA UIM) is great for shedding light on issues with our infrastructure, but how do those issues impact the applications running on that infrastructure? Conversely, CA Application Performance Manager (CA APM) will show us the transactional dataflow and how well it is performing, but when our application is performing poorly because our infrastructure is slowing things down it is not always that easy to see the relationship between the two.
We need to change that!
I am presently focusing on creating a solution to bring CA APM and CA UIM together. I need to find the thought leaders out there who are realists like me and want to see the man behind the curtain. We have some questions to answer, and these can’t be answered alone.
If you desire to be one of those leaders, please follow this blog series as we take look for a way to make it easier to monitor our infrastructure and applications together.
Here are some questions we need to explore:
- When my application users are suffering from a poor user experience due to poor application performance, what is the best way to see a comprehensive view of how my infrastructure performance is impacting my application performance?
- When my application is running in a dynamic infrastructure—like a hybrid cloud—how do I maintain visibility in to my infrastructure that is changing as it transitions form a virtual environment on premise to a cloud infrastructure?
- I have an application-transaction topology view, and an infrastructure topology view. Is there a way they can co-exist together?
- I am an operator of our company’s infrastructure. What applications are running on my infrastructure, and how are they impacted by changes in the infrastructure?
- I am an operator of my company’s key business applications. What changes in the infrastructure are impacting my user’s experience?
There is always more than one way to answer any of these questions. Additionally, there are answers that have not been given yet.
If you would like to participate in this discussion on the future of Application and Infrastructure Management, please comment below, and I will add you to a private community for further discussion.