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Finding Fault With App Management

According to the Fifth Annual State of the Network Study released by Network Instruments, 83% of IT professionals surveyed said problem number one with application management is “determining whether problems are caused by the network, the system or the application.”

The survey of 163 IT professionals looked at three main areas and this story is the third in a series on the study. Also identified as challenges for IT are delivering the bandwidth for video on the network and the management challenges that go with cloud computing.

Besides tracing the source of application problems, 36% of respondents cited handling user complaints and errors as a challenge, 34% mentioned monitoring bandwidth consumption, 33% cited measuring latency and other delay issues while 25% noted problems fixing bugs and applying patches.

“The primary concern that was being reported is being able to triage the issue, being able to determine what IT silo [is the problem],” says Charles Thompson, director of product strategy for Network Instruments. “IT organizations tend to be very siloed and troubleshooting these types of concerns can be a problem.”

Companies have used various network monitoring tools to get a handle on these problems, he says, but that increasingly they have found the need to also monitor operating systems, virtualization hypervisors, the physical hardware as well as the applications. Network performance management systems need to be combined with application management systems, he said, “to really correlate all those different components together so that you can very quickly identify which component is causing problems.”

A new report from Enterprise Management Associates, Radar for Application Performance Management for Cloud Services: Q1 2012, finds that quite a large number of companies are very sophisticated in terms of deployment, but struggling as an industry with finding APM products that can deal with this kind of complexity. Many public cloud providers do not yet offer monitoring agents or APIs, which is hampering vendors' ability to build capabilities management into APM products, according to the report's author, Julie Craig, research director, application management, at EMA.

There are a couple of key challenges in terms of managing cloud applications, she says. "One is that you have to build an end-to-end picture of the transaction or application. Unless you have that [visibility], you don't know where to start in terms of actually solving application performance problems." But the challenge is being able to drill down and understand as many as 30 to 40 components supporting the application to determine the origin of a slowdown, for example.

In spite of the struggles APM vendors are having, Craig was also surprised by "how fast vendors are evolving products to address" the complexity during the timeframe she conducted her research. "There are constant updates and enhancements to cloud APM solutions," she says, "so it's a very rapidly evolving market." APM product vendors covered in the report include OpTier, AppDynamics, AppFirst, Aternity, CA, Compuware, Correlsense, eG Innovations, HP, IBM, INETCO, Nastel, Netuitive, New Relic, OPNET, Quest, SolarWinds and Splunk. More than 40 users of the products were interviewed for the report.

Application management issues, and their increasing complexity, are also a concern to customers of Sourcefire, a provider of network security, performance and application control solutions. Sourcefire introduced a next-generation intrusion prevention system at the recent RSA Conference 2012 in San Francisco and offers other technology to manage applications.

“We hear that continually that just seeing what’s out there [is critical] because it’s such a dynamic environment now,” says Dave Stuart, director of product marketing at Sourcefire. “They needed to be better able to identify the risks and the threats.”