IT Reliability™ through Business Transaction Management
Every organization wants IT reliability: confidence that technology powered business processes will be available, perform well, and adapt to changing business conditions. Companies need to know exactly what is going on and need to be able to predict what the impact of changes will be in order to enable IT reliability. To achieve these goals of IT reliability, IT has made significant investments in initiatives and technologies such as service management, application performance management, and ITIL.
IT reliability seems to be a basic requirement for any business critical application; every end-user that logs in should receive a valid and rapid response for every action performed. Yet, the goal of predictable IT reliability is still eluding most companies and our experience with large enterprises indicates that this is due to the lack of a business context and the necessary correlated transactional IT data.
Enabling IT Reliability
Business Transaction Management (BTM) has been getting a lot of attention lately as a powerful way to enable IT reliability by allowing organizations to collect and analyze the transactional data required to drive effective IT management processes and achieve IT reliability.
Managing IT by the traditional siloed approach is no longer enough to enable IT reliability. A horizontal foundation that connects between the end-users, network, proxy servers, web servers, load balancers, application servers, message brokers, databases and mainframes is needed in order to provide IT reliability. As the common denominator of all of these silos, transactions are able to provide the foundation for IT reliability.
SharePath's unique patent pending technology is able to automatically discover and correlate all of the transactions that flow through these numerous IT silos and store them in a Reliability Management Database (RMDB) in real time.
The granular contextual data that is stored in the reliability management database is leveraged in order to fill the information gaps in today's IT management processes.
IT Reliability - Performance Monitoring
The most important metric to monitor when it comes to application performance and IT reliability is the end-user experience. CPU and memory consumption may be low, but if something is causing IT's main customer, the end-user, to suffer from bad response times it is going to be the only thing that matters.
When the help desk receives a call from a disgruntled user or a real user monitoring tool detects that response times are exceeding SLA, traditional performance monitoring tools are unable to provide visibility into what exactly is affecting that specific end user's response time. SharePath's IT reliability platform will have traced every single hop of the poorly performing transaction throughout the datacenter, enabling IT staff to zoom in to the problematic segment of the transaction, resolve the issue and prevent similar issues from occurring in the future.
IT Reliability - Auditing
Typically an auditing initiative can take many months to put into place, and even when it is, the database and mainframe calls that are being logged at the back end can not always be associated with a specific end-user. Since SharePath's IT reliability platform traces 100% of transactions 24x7 and correlates them with 100% accuracy to an end user, the most challenging part of an auditing initiative is solved. Third party auditing and archiving solutions can access all of the raw transactional data directly from SharePath's reliability management database via its open API.
IT Reliability - Security
SharePath's IT reliability platform is like a CCTV for the enterprise's applications. All of a malicious user's actions are tracked provides both the identification of abnormal usage and forensics. SharePath enables the security team to understand what damage was done and what needs to be fixed in order to prevent similar breaches in the future.
IT Reliability - Capacity Planning
SharePath's IT reliability platform provides data for the creation of accurate capacity planning models for multi-tier applications by automatically relating between datacenter wide transaction volumes and the resources they consume on the underlying infrastructure. SharePath provides the concrete metrics needed in order to answer the question; does the application need to be tuned or does more hardware need to be provisioned?
IT Reliability - Change Management
SharePath's IT reliability platform automatically audits the impact of application and configuration changes and stores them in the RMDB. SharePath acts as a bridge between the test and production environments by providing a common platform to assess the impact of changes on people, process and technology down to the most granular level.
IT Reliability - Chargeback
SharePath provides chargeback reports for every IT component, SharePath enables the workload of a specific component to be broken down by users, business units, applications, services and transactions. With SharePath, when the business makes a change in its processes that affect back-end datacenter workloads, IT can provide concrete metrics on why operating costs are increasing.