correlsense and metron_transaction-based_capacity_planning_2

A White Paper

Correlsense and Metron: Transaction-Based Capacity Planning for Greater IT Reliability™

Managing day-to-day IT operations is like piloting a large freightliner; some days, the trip can be smooth sailing. Other days are fraught with stress. Why is our e-commerce site slowing down at 11:00 pm every Thursday? How will I support the roll-out of a new service without adding more hardware? Having the analytics needed to accurately isolate problems and make informed business decisions is important. This paper discusses the Correlsense and Metron approach to expertly capturing and correlating transaction-level data, and how this information can be used by enterprises to determine whether they have sufficient capacity at both the service and component levels to meet the needs of the business.


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Transaction-Level Data Drives Business Planning

Every IT shop has a dashboard of information that shows what’s happening at any given time. For, most IT organizations this is made up from an arsenal of tools, with each one able to only handle a specific task, or tools that only conduct random samplings, which, in turn, does not give a complete snapshot of what’s really happening.

In order to understand how service levels are affected by infrastructure and application components requires studying how transactions are performing. A transaction includes everything that happens in the data center from the moment the user clicks a button until they get a response. Transactions are what drive business. Transactions are what the user experiences, transactions are what are traversing through the various infrastructure, network, and application components. Simply put, transactions are the common denominator that links the business and all of the various elements of IT.

Capacity Planning Challenges

The following comments are typical of the challenges facing capacity managers today:

“We can monitor and understand the performance of our estate at the component level, but we are struggling to determine the performance of our applications and services and how they are affected by the components.”

“We’ve consolidated and virtualized our servers and now they’re running at much higher utilization, but now our service performance targets don’t seem to be as relevant.”

Capacity planning is an important step in forecasting how IT can support the growing needs of the business. One of the challenges that many capacity planning prospects and customers have is simply knowing which servers and components serve which applications to begin with. Without this knowledge it is difficult to go through a proper capacity planning process.

Many solutions focus on monitoring the individual IT components and creating usage models to predict their utilization along with business growth. In simple application architectures this will suffice, but in complex and dynamic architectures, where applications communicate with each other, it is difficult to predict the true impact of business growth of a specific department or product lines because the complexity makes it hard to tell which infrastructure items (servers and their logical software components) are serving which business applications.

The main challenges of capacity planning, with respect to infrastructure planning and the optimization of resources, are:

• What is the expected business growth next year, and how will it affect our infrastructure?

• Which infrastructure items (servers and logical components) are serving which business application or business transaction?

• Which application infrastructure can be consolidated without degrading service levels?

• How will the relationship between the underlying components affect both the services and in a wider context the business that uses them?

• How do the requirements of constantly changing environments impact the monitoring requirements?


These challenges are very hard to address when:

• The IT infrastructure is complex, dynamic and based on a multi-tier structure

• Multiple applications continuously interact with each other across multi-platform infrastructures

How to Jointly Address the Challenges

The transaction is the missing link which correlates across all of these components. By being able to trace transactions, Correlsense SharePath is capable of providing the required contextual visibility which enables capacity planning for complex environments, resulting in better and more accurate capacity planning. By feeding transaction contextual data into Metron’s Athene modeling software, this data can then become the basis for addressing all of the capacity questions faced by an organization.

About Correlsense SharePathCorrelsense offers software that provides enterprises with an IT Reliability™ platform to keep business applications working properly.

The company’s flagship product, SharePath, provides unprecedented visibility into how transactions perform across the enterprise’s infrastructure, both from a birds-eye view and down to the very deep transaction details, which helps to rapidly pinpoint and resolve performance problems. Using patent-pending transaction path detection technology, SharePath traces every discrete transaction from the click of an end-user through each hop in the data center, while maintaining its context, 24x7, with negligible overhead and 100% accuracy, as it is purpose-built for a production environment.

By being able to record and correlate every transaction activation across both physical and virtual components, IT gains full visibility and transaction contextual metrics, which is required to ensure IT Reliability™ for both packaged and homegrown applications.

The rich data from SharePath is used by enterprises to rapidly pinpoint and solve problems and to gain unprecedented insights that can help to:

• Reduce time to isolate and resolve performance issues, eliminating finger-pointing and the need for “war rooms” whenever a performance issue arises

• Reduce the risks in rolling out new services, and reduce the length of these rollouts

• Understand how configuration changes impact application performance and service levels

• Optimize applications and their use of infrastructure resources to allow a better user experience, and enable infrastructure consolidation

• Improve the capacity planning process

About Metron AtheneAthene, the most scalable product in its class, provides enterprise ITIL-compliant Capacity Management, automatic performance analysis and reporting for physical and virtual environments.

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Athene enables the capacity manager to quickly identify what systems to focus on first, where the potential capacity ‘pinch points’ will occur and what to do about them.

With the widest and most flexible range of automated data capture mechanisms businesses around the globe use Athene to:

• Better understand how the underlying infrastructure components are performing

• Analyze performance trends to ensure IT infrastructure continues to meet the requirements of the business

• Accurately monitor the current service levels relative to the environment and predict how these may change based on real-life business scenarios.

• Manage infrastructure costs by modeling hardware and workload scenarios, preventing over-expenditure on hardware/software and assuring optimal levels of capacity

• Diagnose the true cause of system performance problems

• Reduce the skills and manpower required to actively manage performance and capacity

• Provide a single pane of glass to view enterprise capacity and performance management

• Reduce virtual and physical server sprawl

Correlsense and Metron

Transaction-Based Capacity Planning for Greater IT Reliability™

The primary goals for capacity planning are to plan infrastructure resources based on expected future demand; maintain quality of service, minimize ‘surprises’ (such as performance degradations and outages) and the costs associated with correcting them; and optimize resource utilization to enable consolidation and reduce costs.

SharePath has the ability to see how transactions perform across the infrastructure, and can therefore create an accurate dynamic auto-detected topology map. This real-time topology map provides the missing link between the business applications and transactions being executed in the data center and the IT infrastructure they rely upon. In addition, SharePath knows for each transaction type (e.g., “login”, “send_money”, “buy_stock”…) which tiers are utilized, and what workload it consumes on each and every tier (e.g., Web, application, database, ESB, Web services, etc.) for each transaction type, volumes, and by which department.

Athene is designed to capture data from the widest range of infrastructure components possible. Capacity and performance information is stored in a central database, analyzed and provides the core output for the Capacity Management process. Athene monitors current performance, analyzes recent behavior, reviews past trends and predicts future service levels, with advice and exception reporting on alarms and alerts.

By combining the core strengths of the two products, SharePath can provide the necessary data to Athene, so that, for example, based on 30% expected growth in the Sales department, Athene can know exactly which servers and components will be affected, which transactions are activated, and what the volumes are.

Metron can then use this data to build more accurate “transaction-based capacity planning” workload models, which better fit the complex and dynamic architectures of today’s IT infrastructure.

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The outcome is a more accurate prediction of:

• Which infrastructure components should be strengthened or provisioned (or de-provisioned)

• How application consolidation impacts business, and which departments and transactions are affected

The benefits to the customer are:

• Reduced risk of capacity planning mistakes/wrong assumptions for complex and dynamic architectures

• Improved service delivery

• Cost savings by optimizing resources with business demand and growth

Summary

The combination of Correlsense SharePath and Metron Athene provides a complete capacity management solution that allows organizations to understand the performance of both the core system and the critical services. By combining business forecast information, IT organizations can predict whether they have sufficient capacity to meet the needs of the business at both the component and service levels. Using these complimentary products, enterprises can move to the next level of virtualization performance assurance by optimizing the performance of the virtual infrastructure, while maintaining the required business service levels.

In summary, the utilization of Correlsense SharePath and Metron Athene can provide valuable insight into the performance of enterprise data center environments never available before, along with a sound basis from which to build a comprehensive customer-focused capacity management process.

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