Step-by-Step, Putting It Together
Developers need a tool that measures the right service-level metrics and that can help them discover potential performance issues from a real user's perspective, with granularity down to individual transactions. By monitoring and tracing both synthetic and user-generated transactions while testing an application beta release, developers can proactively resolve issues that might impact production ramp up, including abnormalities with a low probability of occurrence but severe consequences. The actionable transaction performance information can also be utilized to tune the application and infrastructure so as to minimize the variability in response time over the entire spectrum of users. Finally, with the application in production, ITIL calls for continued optimization. A common tool that provides both the extensive transactional information required by developers and the scalability and low overhead of an operations tool is needed to facilitate cooperation and metadata transparency.
Table 1 summarizes the needs and requirements for cross-functional tools that can bridge the deployment phase of the ITIL application lifecycle with the operation and optimization phases, as well as the functional needs of developers during deployment, and the on-going 24/7 operations monitoring and problem resolution needs of operations personnel.
Conclusion
Applying an approach to monitor and diagnose performance problems from a real user's perspective during the deployment and operation phases of the application lifecycle can assure the performance of web application, and reduce the time to problem resolution in production. This approach offers data that can bridge the gap between development and IT operations, baking in performance preproduction, and offering an effective communication between development and operations to facilitate the resolution of performance issues to restore and optimize application performance.
| Needs | Functional Requirements |
| Direct measurement of end-user response time, especially for composite web applications | Nonintrusive instrumentation of end-user browser for direct end-to-end performance measurement |
| Discover all real transactional paths through infrastructure and application | Trace all real transactions from browser to back-end to the specificity of inside/outside firewall, tier, server, web service, and method/query level |
| Identify infrastructure and application bottlenecks | Record and report time taken by each constituent element (whether infrastructure or application) to process transaction |
| Common platform for developers and operations personnel | Record end-to-end transaction performance and tracing information, yet scalable with low-overhead for production use |
| Efficient workflow facilitating cooperation between functional groups: business, development, and operations | Case-based workflow centered around business groups supported by extensive business-impact reporting |
