Diagnosing application performance problems is never easy for IT. Application engineers talk one language, systems engineer speak a different language. Reconciling those views in most organizations is the Holy Grail for most IT departments.Netuitive, Inc would like to be the one to deliver on that promise. The application performance management company announced today that its newest release, Netuitive 5.0, would combine its system performance management console, System Intelligence (SI), with its application performance management console, Service Analyzer (SA).
With version 5.0, application engineers and system engineers would finally have a single platform for diagnosing application problems end-to-end. An engineer could click on a cloud service offering, such as online storefront, in the 5.0 console and view the sub-services that might make up that complete cloud service offering, such as authentication, catalog look-up, inventory and credit card authorization, even if some of these are enabled by third-party providers. The engineer could then diagnose the cause behind a failure or slow down in cloud service.
The other major addition in the new release is a backend database, the Performance Management Database (PMDB) for capacity management. The PMDB integrates raw performance data collected by existing systems monitoring tools, such as from BMC, CA, IBM, HP, Microsoft and VMware. By drawing on the performance data, organizations can analyze resource utilization from hundreds of different angles, such as identifying the most under/over-utilized servers, identifying factors driving the workload for a group of servers or analyzing resource usage by application, region, owner, business unit or service. Users can also export data to third-party enterprise reporting and analysis tools for long-range capacity planning.
Cloud computing shook up IT in fundamental ways. Management of a virtualized IT infrastructure requires being able to adapt dynamically to changing conditions. Simply setting threshold on CPU utilization isn't enough when multiple servers maybe sharing that processor. Yet all too often application performance management platforms have been static forcing IT managers to do just that.
"You use your experience to decide. As an atomic system, you take some measurements and it's easy to setup a threshold, but in a virtualized environment, it becomes a more complex system." says Henry Mayorga, director of infrastructure at Baron Funds, an investment firm and a Netuitive customer. "Now hardware is abstracted and software looks like hardware. Figuring out what those thresholds should be is much more complex. If you're evaluating a host CPU but don't know if being shared between one, two or three services, it's very difficult to do." Analysts have reported something similar. "Cloud computing is quickly gaining traction in the marketplace, yet private, cloud-based infrastructures are far more dynamic than anything a data center manager could have envisioned even five years ago," comments Dennis Drogseth, Vice President with Enterprise Management Associates.
