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J2EE APPLICATION PERFORMANCE:BEYOND THE BEAN

A White Paper and Case Study prepared for Integrated ResearchDecember 2004

Featuring: Case study Bank-Verlag, Germany

Top-10 requirements for J2EE performance management Overview of PROGNOSIS for J2EE performance monitoring


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J2EE APPLICATION PERFORMANCE: BEYOND THE BEAN

200 4 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARYNearly every Global Fortune 500 enterprise today uses the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) to supply business-criticalapplications to its users,which typically comprise internal users as well as external customers and partners. One critical

success factor in deploying J2EE applications is being able to monitor and manage these applications, and untilrecently, there was a shortfall in the quantity and quality of J2EE management solutions. Historically, managementsolutions have treated the J2EE virtual machine, or JVM, as a black box, providing no visibility into the innerworkings of the JVM.

Fortunately, management vendors have caught up with the J2EE management challenges, and it is now possible topurchase enterprise-class J2EE management solutions. In fact, so many vendors rushed J2EE management solutions

to market, that there is now a dizzying array available. While the sudden glut ofmanagement technologies is not necessarily a bad thing, it does make theselection of one vendor difficult.

There are a number of key criteria to consider when purchasing a J2EE

management solution. These include rapid deployment, support for multiplelevels of visibility into the J2EE environment, scalability to hundreds orthousands of managed servers, resilience to network outages, low managementoverhead, multiple platform support, support for enabling technologies such asdatabase servers, comprehensive notification and reporting capabilities, andservice level management capabilities. In addition, the J2EE managementsolution should be capable of true management: command-and-control over themanaged systems, including script- and policy-based corrective actions. Whilethere are a number of small point solutions on the market that solve individualpieces of the J2EE management puzzle, they fall short of providing a completeset of management capabilities.

When all of these criteria are evaluated in the context of prospective vendors,the solution set shrinks to just a few. One of the companies that can meet thesecriteria is Integrated Research. This company has been providing real-timemonitoring solutions under its PROGNOSIS brand for more than 16 years,supporting many platforms including Windows, UNIX, Linux, and HPNonStop. Integrated Research recently released two additions to thePROGNOSIS suite aimed at providing J2EE application performancemonitoring: PROGNOSIS Application Server Management for Windows,UNIX, and Linux; and PROGNOSIS J2EE Application Performance Monitorfor HP NonStop. These products, built on the existing PROGNOSISfoundation, provide deep visibility into the J2EE application environment as wellas the supporting technologies, enabling businesses to measure the real-time

performance of their J2EE applications against established service levels.

While the PROGNOSIS J2EE products are new, the brand and reputation ofIntegrated Research is not. EMA spoke with one customer in Germany, Bank-Verlag, which is using the core PROGNOSIS products to monitor its UNIX andNonStop servers.The bank has also recently deployed PROGNOSIS to monitorits J2EE applications, and already has two production servers being monitoredby the product. The bank reports good success with the product, and plans tocontinue its production rollout.

1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY2 I NTRODUCTION

3 THE JUSTIFICATION FORJ2EE PERFORMANCEMANAGEMENT

3 ADVANTAGES OF J2EEPERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT3 Static Application Problems

3 Dynamic Application

Problems

4 PERFORMANCE IMPACTSBEYOND J2EE

4 REQUIREMENTS FOR THEIDEAL J2EE MANAGEMENTSOLUTION

5 I NTEGRATED RESEARCHPROGNOSIS

PERFORMANCE MONITORING5 Two New Additions to the

PROGNOSIS Suite

5 Strengths of the PROGNOSIS

J2EE Solution5 Weaknesses of the

PROGNOSIS J2EE Solution

6 Case Study: Bank-Verlag

6 EMAS PERSPECTIVE

7 ABOUT INTEGRATEDRESEARCH


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Integrated Researchs reputation, combined with therecommendation of Bank-Verlag, leads EMA toconclude that Integrated Research has produced

another strong management product that is worthy ofconsideration by IT managers that need to gainvisibility into the performance and availability of J2EEapplications.

INTRODUCTIONApplication development using the J2EE languagecontinues to grow at an astounding rate. Initiallyrelegated to adding functionality to static Web pages,J2EE has grown to become a mainstream developmentplatform. Today it is safe to assume that every GlobalFortune 500 company has business-critical J2EE

applications in production.

Unfortunately, the adoption of J2EE performancemanagement technologies has lagged behind theproduction deployment of the applications. Thereasons for this are many and varied, including a lack offocus on performance issues and a lack of robustmanagement tools. The former is an extremelyunsound practice fraught with danger, and the latter issimply no longer the case.

In the beginning, J2EE performance management was

simple because Web application architectures weresimple. Now, a typical production J2EE application iscomprised of multiple tiers, including front-end loadbalancers, Web servers, J2EE application servers, Java

Virtual Machines (JVMs), and database servers. Thisincrease in architectural complexity has spawned anentire segment of management tools; however, many

companies today have yet to leverage thesetechnologies to ensure the performance of theirmainstream business systems.

It is time for IT to realize that until deep visibility intothe environment is available, the entire J2EEapplication delivery mechanism is really just a blackboxa dangerous situation to bet your business on.Enterprises today need to acknowledge the potentialbusiness losses that can result from impropermanagement of the J2EE equation.

One example of an organization that has taken this toheart is Bank-Verlag (http:/ / www.bank-verlag.de/),based in Cologne, Germany. Bank-Verlag is the officialservices and IT competence provider for over 300private banks in Germany. Since the bank is a serviceprovider to other banks, which depend on Bank-Verlagfor data such as credit ratings and the ability to checkon the status of inter-bank transfers, the availability andperformance of these systems is critical to theirsuccess. The Bank chose to standardize on J2EE forthese systems, using an IBM On Demand UNIXplatform to provide high availability. The Bank realized

that without a comprehensive management solution, itran the risk of not being able to provide contractuallyagreed-upon service levels to its customersanunacceptable level of risk to the business.



Figure 1: Example production J2EE application architecture
http://www.bank-verlag.de/http://www.bank-verlag.de/http://www.bank-verlag.de/http://www.bank-verlag.de/


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THE JUSTIFICATION FORJ2EE PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENTJ2EE applications provide critical customer-facing,

high visibility, revenue-bearing applications. Theimpact of outages is the most compelling justificationfor performance management. Consider the impactsof an outage to Bank-Verlag: the 300+ customerbanks that rely upon Bank-Verlag to provide customercredit rating information cannot approve loanswithout this information being readily available, 24x7.If Bank-Verlag cannot provide guaranteed levels ofservice, they face financial penalties, and theircustomers cannot transact business. When the overallimpact from such an outage is considered, thepotential losses from just one system outage could bemillions of Euros.

When justifying an investment in J2EE management, itis necessary to quantify the potential business lossesfrom system outages. These losses vary widely, butEnterprise Management Associates (EMA) researchhas shown that losses due to outages of critical systemscan range from US $50,000 to over $1 million per hourin large enterprises. Assuming that the cost of amanagement solution that could prevent outages is$100,000, the payback period for such an investmentranges from six minutes to two hours of preventeddowntimea compelling business case, even for onlyone application. For businesses with multipleapplications, economies of scale can drasticallyincrease the ROI.

There are several other compelling points that justify aJ2EE management solution. Consider the sheercomplexity of many J2EE deployments today such asthat depicted in Figure 1 which include at least fourtiers, spanning multiple platforms and technologies. Aholistic management solution is needed that can spanthese tiers, delivering multiple dimensions of visibility,

including top-down, end-user performance monitoringand bottom-up elemental performance metrics. Such asolution would increase the productivity and respon-siveness of IT personnel and decrease time-to-marketfor business applications by simplifying qualityassurance and deployment processes. The rightsolution can also aid in regulatory complianceinitiatives by allowing IT to tightly control and audit

changes to the production environment.

Justification for investment in any managementtechnology boils down to two factors: cost and benefit.If the benefits far outweigh the costs, then theinvestment is a good one.

ADVANTAGES OF J2EE PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENTIt is crucial to understand that traditional approaches toapplication performance management, designed in theclient/ server era, do not translate well to theWeb/ J2EE world. Existing tools, which can providesome visibility into the J2EE infrastructure, lack thedepth necessary to be truly useful in a productionenvironment.

Likewise, many pre-deployment testing tools thatprovide extremely deep visibility into J2EEperformance are unsuitable for production use due tohigh levels of overhead and limited scalability. Aproduction-quality J2EE performance managementsolution needs to provide deep visibility into theapplication without sacrificing performance.

There are two classes of application problems that anyenterprise-class management system should be able toaddressstatic and dynamic:

Static Application ProblemsStatic problems are generally those that, once fixed,do not reoccur; examples include memory leaks andother code bugs. Static problems can generally(although not always) be solved with a pre-deployment testing tool. While static problems aresignificant, they comprise the minority of productionissues since many of them are fixed during the qualityassurance and deployment phases (or can be detectedand corrected in a test environment even after theapplication is placed into production).

Dynamic Application ProblemsDynamic application problems are more severe and arecharacterized by transiencein other words, theseproblems rarely reoccur the same way. The reasons forthis are many, including unpredictable user loads andconcurrent activity, combined with contention causedby multiple applications hosted on a single server.Secondary problems caused by environmental


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variations and configuration errors may also only occuron a small subset of the servers that support anapplication, making troubleshooting difficult.

Compounding the problem are virtualizationtechnologiesdevices such as load balancers can causeindividual server problems that are nearly impossible totrack down. Dynamic problems are also known todisappear after a system reboot. As one might expect,these problems comprise the vast majority ofproduction-level problems, and provide the biggestchallenge when determining root-cause. They are alsothe most expensive and impactful to fix.

In addition to aiding in the troubleshooting process forstatic and dynamic problems, J2EE performancemanagement solutions must address the world beyondthe J2EE environment, since many failures occuroutside of the J2EE application server or JVM.

PERFORMANCE IMPACTS BEYOND J2EENumerous external factors beyond the J2EEenvironment can affect application performance. J2EEmanagement solutions should be able to monitor andtroubleshoot across the greater J2EE infrastructure.Examples of situations that can affect J2EEapplication performance include network issues,

storage problems, resource contention, databaseproblems, and even security issues like denial-of-service attacks. The holy grail of J2EE performancemanagement must be to rapidly determine the sourceof performance problems, regardless of tier, and thenaid IT in repairing the problem as quickly as possible.

It is important to realize that each step in the J2EEarchitecture is a critical point of failure, and that J2EEapplications tend to have the most moving parts ofany production application. It is critical that the systemchosen to manage these applications is capable ofmonitoring and correlating problems across tiers, andthat it can understand the relationship between thetiers. An ideal monitoring solution should be able tomonitor a variety of server types and applications inaddition to the core J2EE monitoring function.

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE IDEALJ2EE MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONA holistic J2EE management solution must provide

more than just J2EE monitoring. There are literallydozens of J2EE point products designed to solvespecific, narrowly focused problems. While useful,these products provide limited utility on an enterprise-wide basis, particularly if they do not easily integratewith other management systems. Purchases of pointproducts should be limited to those that have a specific,easily quantified value proposition and that addressspecific problems not covered by other managementsystems.

Ideal J2EE management solutions should include the

following Top 10 key features and functions. Note thata solution that provides all of these functions probablydoes not exist, but this list can be used as an aid inscoring a vendors current and planned capabilities inthe J2EE space.

Top 10 features and functions scorecard:

Rapid deployment in less than a week withminimal customization and services requiredfrom the vendor

Support for various levels of visibility into theJ2EE environment, from high-level to low-level

Scalability to hundreds or thousands of managedservers with minimal management serverinvestment required

Resilience to network outagesmessage-basedarchitecture is preferable

Low overhead requirements on managedserversless than 5% of total resources anddynamic throttle-management overhead on busy

systems Ability to monitor and span multiple tiers and

platforms, including Windows, UNIX, and Linux

Support for enabling platforms such as databaseservers, load balancers, etc.

Comprehensive notification and reportingcapabilities


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Support for service level management, includingmonitoring of service level objectives

Command-and-control capabilities beyond basicmonitoring, such as script- and policy-basedcorrective actions

INTEGRATED RESEARCHPROGNOSIS PERFORMANCE MONITORINGIntegrated Research has been providing real-timeperformance monitoring solutions under itsPROGNOSIS brand for more than 16 years. Many ofthe world's largest organizations use PROGNOSISand the company has an impressive customer base,particularly in its traditional, high-availability HP

NonStop market.

Two New Additions to the PROGNOSIS SuiteIntegrated Research recently released two additions tothe PROGNOSIS suite aimed at providing J2EEapplication performance monitoring: PROGNOSISApplication Server Management for Windows, UNIX,and Linux; and PROGNOSIS J2EE ApplicationPerformance Monitor for HP NonStop.

From the J2EE application server and JVMperspective, the two products are identical. The maindifference between the two is that theWindows/ UNIX/ Linux product includes base serveroperating system monitoring in addition to J2EEapplication server and JVM monitoring; whereas theHP NonStop version includes only the J2EEapplication server and JVM components. This is due toarchitectural differences between the PROGNOSISHP NonStop and Windows/ UNIX/ Linux offeringsHP NonStop products are highly modular and many ofthese customers already own the server-levelmonitoring module.

These PROGNOSIS products enable businesses tomeasure the performance of their J2EE applicationsagainst established service levels, as the service isdelivered. Servlet response times are mapped againstservice level objectives in real-time, enabling theimmediate measurement of performance in terms ofideal, acceptable, poor, and breach service levels.PROGNOSIS enables precision tuning down to theservlet, allowing different service levels to be specified

for different processes. For example, an SLA for loginmay be set to 5 seconds, a search or add-to-cart SLAset to 3 seconds, while checkout is set to 5 seconds.

PROGNOSIS provides performance information ofthe J2EE constructs, including EJB pooling, commitand rollback rates, JMS queue status and length, JDBCpool, and query time. This detailed insight provides formeasurement and optimization of the J2EEinfrastructure, including the behaviors of pools andtransactions in live production environments.

Strengths of the PROGNOSIS J2EE SolutionThe PROGNOSIS platform has much strength in andof itself that adds to the total value proposition of the

J2EE products. These advantages include excellentsupport, low implementation costs, and a reasonable,easy-to-understand pricing structure that scales well.The PROGNOSIS architecture is innately faulttolerant and provides real-time as well as historicalmetrics. For more information on specific value pointsof the PROGNOSIS solution, please refer to EMAswhite paper entitled Systems Management: The RealROI is Time to Value and Total Cost of Ownership(September 2003).

Integrated Researchs J2EE products build on theadvantages of the core PROGNOSIS platform byadding deep J2EE domain expertise such as detailedJVM performance information including memoryconsumption, garbage collection, method invocationsand CPU time. This information is useful for the rareoccasions when algorithmic performance breaks downin a production environment and visibility at theprogrammers level is required. PROGNOSIS alsoincludes the ability to sample JVM performance, tominimize the impact on production systems.

These products, which can operate independently or inconjunction with other members of the PROGNOSISfamily, satisfy a high percentage of the idealrequirements outlined earlier in this document.

Weaknesses of the PROGNOSIS J2EE SolutionLike many entries into the J2EE performancemanagement market, Integrated Researchs J2EEproducts are new. This is not necessarily a bad thing,given the evolution of the J2EE market in general.




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Prospective customers will need to take a bit of a leapof faith with these products, as Integrated Researchdoes not currently have many reference customers that

have deployed these products in a productionenvironment. Bank-Verlag, described previously in thisdocument, has successfully deployed thePROGNOSIS J2EE products in a productionenvironment. However, since the core PROGNOSISsolution has been proven repeatedly in the marketplacefor over 16 years, EMA believes that IntegratedResearchs J2EE solutions will follow the pedigree ofthe rest of the product line, delivering high value for avery reasonable price.

Case Study: Bank-Verlag

As discussed previously, the success of Bank-Verlag isdependent on the availability and performance of itsJ2EE applications. The bank has been a user of thecore PROGNOSIS solution for UNIX for some timenow, and currently manages over 60 productionsystems using the product. When the bank begansearching for a J2EE management solution, theynaturally approached Integrated Research to see ifPROGNOSIS could satisfy their requirements.

Bank-Verlag has a number of business-critical BEAWebLogic J2EE applications running on

UNIX equipment, front-ended with Apache Webservers and back-ended with IBM DB2 databaseservers. Due to the requirements for high availability,these applications run in two physically separate datacenters, using two different ISPs for redundancy. Thesystems must be available to their customers 24x7x365.The bank also has SLAs with customers requiring that97% of all transactions are executed in less than fourseconds. Failure to meet these SLAs can result infinancial penalties to the bank.

EMA spoke with Stefan Breschinski, who isresponsible for Bank-Verlags J2EE applications. Stefanindicated that they are pleased with the PROGNOSISsolution and have near-future plans to increase thenumber of production servers monitored byPROGNOSIS. Additionally, Stefan made particularreference to Integrated Researchs willingness to workwith the bank in adding functionality to the productsthat enables Bank-Verlag to meet its requirements.

Stefan also indicated that PROGNOSIS has been very

helpful in reducing the amount of time it takes for hispersonnel to find and correct J2EE performanceissues, which is critical to meeting and provingcompliance with the SLAs. By using PROGNOSIS tomonitor J2EE applications from multiple perspectives,including outside of the firewall, Bank-Verlag is able torectify performance problems when they occur.

EMAS PERSPECTIVEEMA has tracked Integrated Research for a number ofyears and has confidence in the companys ability todeliver on its J2EE performance management vision.

Integrated Researchs customers are highly satisfied andvery loyal, praising the company for its excellent serviceand support. They are also very pleased with the overallcost of PROGNOSIS, reporting that IntegratedResearchs solutions typically are a fraction of the costof competitive products. In particular, Bank-Verlagpraised Integrated Researchs flexible approach to bothtechnical and financial requirements. In the same waythat the product functionality was specifically adaptedto meet their needs,a pricing structure was also tailoredto better match Bank-Verlags financial dynamics.

While Integrated Research is new to the J2EEperformance management market, it is worth notingthat even the most senior J2EE management productshave been on the market for only a few years. What issignificant, in EMAs opinion, is the maturity,reputation, and vision of the company providing theproducts, and Integrated Research excels in all ofthese areas.



We are extremely dependent on our J2EEapplications, which we use to deliver critical

business functionality to over 300 of our

customers. Because of our satisfaction withIntegrated Researchs PROGNOSIS software,we approached the company with our J2EEmanagement requirements, which includedusing one tool to manage all of the different

tiers of the application including the underlyingserver and operating system. PROGNOSIS now

fulfills our needs for J2EE performancemonitoring, saving us a lot of time and money.

Stefan Breschinski, Bank-Verlag


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Clearly, PROGNOSIS J2EE products are in the earlystages of their development. For initial releaseproducts, however, they have much of the same

functionality provided by competitive products thathave been on the market much longerat a loweroverall total cost of ownership. Add the core benefitsof the PROGNOSIS platform to the J2EE valueproposition, and the solution becomes even morecompelling. Assuming Integrated Research delivers onits vision for the PROGNOSIS J2EE products, thecompany could very well become a dominant player inthe J2EE management market, directly competing withmanagement vendors including HP, IBM, andComputer Associates.

EMA recommends that IT managers tasked withensuring the performance of business-critical J2EEapplications take a hard look at PROGNOSIS.Integrated Research has an excellent record ofdelivering high value at a reasonable price, and EMAbelieves that the PROGNOSIS J2EE products will notbe an exception to the rule.

ABOUT INTEGRATED RESEARCHAs a result of the global success of the PROGNOSISfamily of products, Integrated Research has becomethe worlds largest supplier of systems and application

management solutions for HP NonStop systems.

The company has extended its true fault tolerantsoftware design to Windows, UNIX and Linuxplatforms, creating comprehensive solutions thatsimplify the management of distributed systems andapplications.

These solutions manage servers, networks, desktops,and applications ranging from Microsoft Exchange to

complex e-business applications, financial transactionprocessing systems, and more.

A truly global player, Integrated Research has sales andsupport offices in the USA, Europe, and Australia.With the assistance of an international network ofdistributors and marketing partners, IntegratedResearch markets its solutions to over 60 countries.

North and South America

Integrated Research Inc.7600 E. Eastman, Suite 400Denver CO 80231 USAToll Free 1-800-942-7382Tel +1 (303) 283-7700Fax +1 (303) [email protected]

Europe

Integrated Research (UK) LtdCentennial CourtEasthampstead RoadBracknell RG12 1YQ United KingdomTel +44 1344 386666Fax +44 1344 [email protected]

Asia Pacific, Africa & Middle East

(Corporate Headquarters)Integrated Research LtdLevel 10, 168 Walker StreetNorth SydneyNSW 2060 AustraliaTel +61 (2) 9966 1066Fax +61 (2) 9966 [email protected]

For more information, please visit www.ir.com.

About Enterprise M anage ment Associates, Inc.Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. i s the fastest growing an alyst fi rm focused on the management software and services market. EMA brings strategic insights t o both vendors and IT professionals seeking to leverage areas of growth across e-business, network, systems and application management. Enterprise Managements vision and insights draw from its ongoing research and the perspectives of an experienced team with diverse, real-world backgrounds in the IT, service provider,ISV and publishing communities.

This report in whole or in part may not be duplicated, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or retransmitted without prior written permission of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All opinions and estimates herein constitute our judgmentas of this date and are subject to change without notice. Product names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/ or registered trademarks of t heir respective companies. 200 4 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

2000_0872 12032004Corporate Headquarters2585 Central Avenue, Suite 100Boulder, CO 80301Phone: 303.543.9500Fax: 303.543.7687

Email: info@ enterprisemanagement.comWeb: www.enterprisemanagement.com
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