Proactive infrastructure performance monitoring and mitigation

IT operations professionals face a number of challenges in their efforts to proactively monitor IT infrastructure and application performance and mitigate performance degradations. Today’s complex enterprise IT environments are characterized by a mix of physical and virtualized infrastructure located across multiple remote sites and data centers, in addition to cloud environments and “as-a-Service” platforms. This complicates efforts to achieve complete visibility over the IT infrastructure and its performance, a key consideration before monitoring performance proactively.

In their efforts to proactively monitor and manage infrastructure and application performance, IT operations professionals, such as the infrastructure manager, the DevOps manager, and the data center manager, seek to:

• Achieve full IT infrastructure visibility across all hosts, sites, and data centers, as well as cloud environments (public, private, hybrid) and “as-a-Service” platforms (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS) in real time
• Establish performance baselines based on historical levels of IT infrastructure performance, including trends, peaks, and seasonality, to determine target performance thresholds
• Implement alert thresholds for individual hosts, applications, and services, leveraging internal key performance indicators (KPIs) or third-party Service Level Agreement (SLA) commitments where available
• Monitor infrastructure and application performance on an ongoing basis to ensure that it meets KPIs or SLAs, taking preventative action where performance levels are trending negatively
• Detect and alert infrastructure performance degradations in real time, preferably even before end-users notice and report them
• Assign responsibility for the resolution of an infrastructure performance degradation to a specific team (application, database, DevOps, etc.), sharing evidence in support of diagnosing its root cause

Effective proactive infrastructure monitoring and application performance monitoring

To achieve the goal of proactive monitoring and mitigation of infrastructure and application performance degradations, the IT operations professional requires an infrastructure and application performance monitoring and management tool that enables him or her to:

• Visualize the entire IT infrastructure across all sites as well as view all application traffic, including north-south traffic (between sites and data centers) and east-west traffic (within data centers, clouds, and “as-a-Service” platforms)
• Capture application traffic in real time across all applications (including Citrix and HTTPS), hosts, and services to measure enterprise infrastructure performance with zero impact (i.e., wire data metrics)
• Accumulate historical data, covering normal operations, peaks, and seasonality, to determine acceptable thresholds for infrastructure performance, in addition to internal KPIs and SLA commitments
• Configure infrastructure performance thresholds for individual segments or devices
• Monitor infrastructure performance, detect performance degradations and generate alerts in real time, enabling IT operations professionals to act before the first user reports come in
• Confirm the presence of performance degradations with at-a-glance information that clearly identifies negative performance trends and exceptions, with the ability to drill down to identify the root cause
• View the users, hosts, sites, or devices affected by infrastructure and application performance degradations and consider them in relation to their expected performance levels, KPIs, or SLA values
• Support efforts toward prompt resolution with the ability to assign responsibility, to notify the affected IT team, and to provide supporting evidence

The well-designed application performance management solution

A well-designed application performance management solution (APM) supports best practices in infrastructure and application performance monitoring and mitigation. It offers the ability to view and understand key aspects of infrastructure and application performance at a high level while providing the granular details necessary to take effective action when performance is impacted. A well-designed APM solution will offer:

• Complete visibility into IT infrastructure across:
  • Data centers and remote offices/sites
    • Hosts, applications, databases
  • Applications (including HTTPS and websites on the Internet)
  • Databases (including individual SQL queries and responses)
  • Devices (load balancers, firewalls, etc.)
  • Virtualized servers (VMware)
  • Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (Citrix XenApp / XenDesktop)
  • Cloud environments (public, private, hybrid; AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)
  • SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS platforms
  • Network services (DNS, NetBIOS, NTP, etc.)
  • VoIP (SIP, Skinny, MGCP) and Unified Communications (UC)
  • File sharing (SMB, CIFS)
• The ability to capture data across all application transactions and measure it in real time to generate performance metrics (i.e., wire data metrics)
  • End-User Response Time (EURT), application throughput, application responsiveness, and Quality of Experience (QoE)
• The ability to capture and store performance data for long periods of time, enabling historical comparisons for the purposes of establishing application performance baselines and evaluating levels of performance degradations
• The ability to configure thresholds for individual applications and their components
• The ability to monitor application performance across all sites and to monitor “hidden” east-west traffic inside data centers and cloud environments as well as virtual machines (VMs) in virtualized environments
• The ability to visualize infrastructure and application performance for different time periods with fine-grained detail and the ability to compare performance over time
• The ability to detect performance degradations in real time and to flag negative infrastructure and application performance trends to take pre-emptive action
• The ability to visualize infrastructure and application performance degradations at a high level and then drill down to their root cause
• The ability to support resolution efforts by sharing evidence of the infrastructure or application performance degradation, including the moments leading up to it

The link between network performance management and application performance monitoring

An application performance management solution (APM) that includes network performance management (NPM) capabilities provides IT operations professionals with the insight and understanding for proactive infrastructure and application performance monitoring and mitigation that a dedicated APM solution simply can’t deliver. With its ability to identify and understand individual network flows and application conversations, an NAPM solution provides the context that goes far beyond the typical reports and graphs of an APM product or a dedicated application monitoring tool. An NAPM solution will demonstrate how a performance degradation at the network level affects the organization’s ability to deliver on critical business outcomes with business-critical applications.

An NAPM solution will:

• Provide a real-time, wide-angle view of the entire network and IT infrastructure, including physical, virtualized, and software-defined networks (SDN); cloud environments; “as-a-Service” platforms; as well as all applications accessed over the network, including visibility into virtualized desktop infrastructure (Citrix) transactions and secure web applications (HTTPS)
• Capture and measure the performance of all network and application traffic between hosts, sites, and data centers (“north-south” traffic) as well as traffic within data centers and clouds (“east-west” traffic), all in real time with no impact on the underlying devices, links, hosts, applications, or services
• Monitor network and application traffic across different layers down to the level of individual application conversations and transactions
• Enable the establishment of baselines for the normal performance of individual networks and applications, as well as peaks and seasonality
• Provide the ability to pinpoint the root cause of a performance degradation by drilling down to the specific network device, link, and service; the specific application chain, host, or application service; and the individual network flows and application transactions, including SQL queries and HTTPS traffic
• Allow for sharing of evidence of the circumstances leading up to, and the effects afterwards, of a performance degradation, including supporting network transactions and application conversations

As a result, an NAPM solution is particularly effective for infrastructure and application performance monitoring and mitigation. Skylight™ is one such example of an NAPM solution for enterprise infrastructure and application performance monitoring and mitigation.

Learn more about Skylight for enterprise infrastructure and application performance monitoring and mitigation.