Understand how DISL solves the APM challenge
Read about how the APPCELERATE service from Diagnosys can drastically reduce the complexity and cost issues concerned with the performance testing of application systems, and contribute to helping customers implement a proactive APM solution throughout the IT organisation.
Application Performance Management (APM) can be defined as an IT systems management discipline to provide the proactive management of the performance and availability of business-critical IT applications and systems. By embarking on implementing APM solutions, organisations aim to optimise business productivity levels by providing users and/or customers with application services that offer adequate and consistent levels of end-user performance and service availability.
One of the major challenges in achieving this goal, is for organisations to adequately understand the performance characteristics and behavioural dynamics of the application system at appropriate stages in the application life-cycle, so that appropriate and timely decisions can be made to mitigate the risks of the application in not being able to offer the correct levels of end-user performance or system availability. The issues involved in such decisions can include:
• Application code efficiency
• System scalability
• Server and network architecture
• Server hardware resources & system capacity
• Network bandwidth capacity
• User location
In an ideal world, no software application and its supporting system infrastructure should be deployed into a live production environment, unless the performance, scalability and resilience of the complete (end-to-end) system has been thoroughly tested and optimised, with all performance bottlenecks identified and understood. Deploying a new application system without a sufficient understanding of these issues is a huge business-risk issue.
However, software performance testing has traditionally been viewed to be a complex and expensive discipline, requiring the use of equally complex and expensive test tools and specialised consultancy that requires significant internal resources to be consumed, lengthy testing timescales, and significant system downtime. Additionally, traditional performance test tools and related consulting practices are well known to often be designed on a “scatter-gun” approach in the attempt to provide a “catch-all” method of understanding the performance characteristics and behaviour of the end-to-end application system. As a consequence, traditional performance test solutions often result in test practices that produce onerous amounts of data and information that are too complex and difficult to interpret and understand precisely what remedial actions are required to optimise system performance and scalability.
With today’s business IT strategies focussed around improving the efficiency of IT services and cutting associated costs through the use of new application architectures using SOA and Web-Services, the trend towards consolidated, virtualised application data centre environments based around technologies such as VMware and Citrix, and the need to develop and deploy new application services that meet business needs from day-1, the need for proactive APM, including performance testing, has never been more important or critical.
Traditional performance testing tools and services emanating from the previous client-server generation are not designed to meet these modern challenges effectively. They are too awkward, too slow, and far too expensive for the modern enterprise to consider as part of a proactive APM solution. What is required is therefore a new performance testing capability that can significantly reduce the complexity and cost factors associated with the modern enterprise.
The newly announced “APPCELERATE” service from Diagnosys is revolutionary in its design and capability to meet these challenges head-on.
APPCELERATE delivers the following benefits for any organisation of any size:
• No software/hardware tool purchase or deployment required.
• Service can test the performance and scalability of any IT application system, irrespective of its software architecture and its hardware server platform.
• No requirement for separate expensive, complex test environments. Existing development or production facilities can be used.
• Vastly reduced impact on internal resources required.
• Drastically reduced testing timescales resulting in faster time-to-insight.
• Can be more easily integrated into the application development cycle
• Overall testing project costs are therefore slashed and business-risks minimised
For more information, please email Diagnosys at info@mydiagnosys.com, or call us on 44 (0)1628 566187.