Over the last two decades, IT organizations have spent billions of dollars implementing fault management tools and processes to maximize network availability. While availability management is critical, infrastructure reliability has improved to the point at which 99.9 percent availability is commonplace. Given these improvements in infrastructure availability, companies are focusing more attention on performance management. By measuring how networked applications and services perform under normal circumstances, understanding how infrastructure and application changes impact performance, and isolating the sources of above-normal latency, IT organizations can ensure problems are resolved quickly, mitigate risk from planned and unplanned changes, and take measured steps to optimize application performance. In this paper, you will learn why this shift is taking place and how a new management model, what CA Technologies calls Performance First, can empower you to advance to the next level in managing your network for application performance.
Most network engineers are very familiar with tools that report statistics on individual components such as links, routers, and servers. These infrastructure monitors have been around for a long time. Newer to the market are performance management solutions that uniquely link end-to-end service and transaction visibility with top-to-bottom understanding of the underlying IT infrastructure across networks, systems and databases to deliver a comprehensive, unified understanding of how applications and infrastructure deliver business services. These performance management solutions not only measure how well response-time service level agreements (SLAs) are being met, they also help IT staff solve a wide variety of problems, leading to significant reductions in operating costs. Furthermore, given today’s economic climate, it is more crucial than ever to make fully informed infrastructure investments, avoid unnecessary expenditures by optimizing the use of existing equipment, and ensure there is no inappropriate use of expensive network resources.
