Time to rethink Application Performance Management - APM 2.0???

Hi Fellow SOA Practitioners' and Cloud Service Providers -

I am sure that many of you are struggling with monitoing highly distributed services that have stringent business SLAs.  I am wondering about how you are managing to tune the performance of the individual components that make up the business service or business process.  I feel that there are some key differences that need to be kept in mind in terms of what legacy APMs have to offer to us vs. what we need in these so called next gen APMs that are built to monitor and manage performance of a distributed SOA stack or a cloud based business service offering

Here are some of the salient features that differentiate this APM 2.0 concept from the legacy APMs.

1. requires to have a deployer or Ops centric deployment view as opposed to a developer centric view
2. built ground up for highly distributed service based deployments as opposed to the single appliction server container or single JVM based monolithic deployments (the forte of legacy APMs)
3. should not force a developer of the code/ scripts to monitor potential perforamance bottle necks as the developer is trained to make things work and to have to force them to define monitoring scripts that require a mindset that looks at where things would break (from a communications perspective or from an integration perspective) is inefficient and error-prone
4. does not force the definition of a per JVM definition of monitoring directives allowing for an highly distributed transaction view or an end to end business process view
5. provides a visual flow like representation that can be combined with policy based definition of SLAs which has the ability to define SLA tolerance/ compliance ranges 
6. is able to support on-demand run time enrichment/ augmentation of the payload that enables activation of monitoring capabilities on a live system as issues occur (or service execution pathways change) as opposed to predicting these performance choke points at deployment time based in known "execution paths"
7. does not focus on logging of information and reactive analysis to enable monitors but can be more proactive, business focused and policy based with on the spot analysis capability

Thoughts on this concept or any one has ideas of tools that do what I am looking for?
 
Thanks for listening.
surekha -

Framework to calculate TCO for Cloud Computing and Virtualization

To my fellow architects -

A lot has been said about how elastic computing or on-demand computing or cloud computing can be a great cost containment vehicle for companies. The key element there is the pay per use costing model of each of these concepts. If an enterprise is able to predict it's work load and it's usage models then these computing concepts make a lot of sense. The question not withstanding issues such as security, the need to control the deployment environment etc. is in regards to whether these elastic computing models truly deliver on the promise of cost savings and/ or cost avoidance.


Has there been a proven way of calculating the TCO for traditional investment in IT assets that could now be used to compare and contrast the advantages or to identify the hidden costs of these pay per use computing models? I am wondering if there have been any frameworks that exist for doing a cost benefit analysis for even concepts such as Virtualization and Grid Computing.  What are some of the elements that need to be plugged into this TCO model to truly get to an accurate figure? Do you include costs associated with "loss of control" and/or "lost business opportunity costs" due to the inability of the cloud provider to scale up an environment during your peak? Is there a truly scientific and proven mechanism, methodology or process that could be used to compute TCO for these newer computing models?

Thanks in advance for your help.
surekha -

Has Anyone realized ROI with Cloud Computing ROI?

Question to the viewers of this blog is how many have used concepts of cloud computing (and I do not mean private clouds, here)? Are you looking at Cloud computing for reduction in infrastructure costs by moving to a pay as you use concept or to augment your peak capacity or else are you using cloud sofware as a service?

What is your experience and are you realizing the ROI as in a lowering of your TCO, or increase in operations efficiency and availability?

Thanks for your input.
surekha -

Issues with Server Virtualization

Virtualization has been considered a great way to maximize utilization of server resources by increasing server density. In addition, this concept is considered to be very key to green IT initiatvies as it reduces the number of compute resources needing to be supported in a data center thus reducing the cooling and power costs.

Having said that, there seems to be a performance downside to virtualization. Given that a virtual machine (VM) is yet another layer of indirection the server HW this layer negatively impacts the performance any time there is a need for the application to access IO Channels, SAN disc and other network resources. This is especially so when the application code is either running inside of a JVM or an application server container such as a JEE container, .NET CLR or even a web server servlet container. In all cases, performance profiles of an application seem to vary whether the application is running inside of a virtual layer vs. directly on the physical server.

Vendors are now focusing on this drawback by introducing the concetp of Just Enough OS (JEOS). It remains to be seen how effective these optimizations prove to be in the realm of critical path enterprise systems.

Thank you.

surekha -