First Impressions of Interop

I landed in Vegas Monday afternoon (5/18) around 4:00. When I stepped out of the hotel I saw something that I have never seen before in Vegas – there was absolutely no line for a taxi. Every other time I have come to Vegas there has been a long line, often lasting a half hour or more. My fear was that the Interop show would be as empty as the taxi line. It is not. It appears to be down some from last year, but there still is a lot of energy here.

The first session I moderated on Tuesday morning was on Application Performance Management (APM). The panelists were from NetQoS, CA and Fluke. I find this to be a very important topic because I strongly believe that all that a company’s business managers really care about is the performance of a handful of applications that they use to run their business unit. All of the infrastructure components (e.g., LAN, WAN, SAN, servers, OSs, firewalls, WOCs – you get the idea) are just a means towards an end.

The attendance at the session was ok, but less than I expected for this topic. The three panelists did a good job of describing APM and their company’s approach. Paul Ellis of CA drove home the fact that CA believes that IT organizations need to focus on the transaction and the quality of the user’s experience with that transaction. Matt Sherrod of NetQoS and Doug Roberts of Fluke Networks both did an admirable job of creating a framework for how IT organizations should approach APM.

The bottom line is that I was quite pleased with all three presentations. Then we got to the Q&A and the gap between what is being promoted by vendors and analysts and what is being practiced by IT organizations became painfully clear. For example, vendors and analysts have been talking for years about what IT organizations need to do to meet their internal SLAs. When asked, hardly any of the participants stated that they offer internal SLAs. That did not surprise me. Even more interesting is that vendors and analysts have also been talking for years about the need for visibility into applications. When asked, relatively few of the participants stated that they had that kind of view even though most of them had some kind of APM tool. That did surprise me. The feedback from the participants was that the main reason they didn’t have that kind of visibility was the overall complexity of the IT environment. Given that I believe that things are only going to get more complex, the gap between theory and practice may well get larger over the next few years.

Jim Metzler

A Comparison of Application Performance Management (APM) Vendors

Management used to be focused primarily on the availability of network devices such as switches and routers. However, in the last few years the focus of management has evolved to where it now typically includes the performance of both networks and applications. While the shift has been relatively recent, the industry is flooded with vendors who claim to offer application performance management (APM) products. Viewed from a hundred thousand foot level, the majority of APM tool vendors all make very similar promises. Most if not all APM tool vendors promise that their products can help to identify when the performance of an application is degrading and can help to identify the component of IT that is causing the degradation; i.e., is it the WAN or the servers that is causing the degradation. Some APM tool vendors claim that their tools also enable an IT organization to identify the particular sub-element (e.g., the particular WAN link or server) that is causing the degradation.

The first panel that I will be moderating at Interop is entitled “Application Performance Management”. The primary goal of this panel is to help IT organizations get better at APM. A secondary goal is to help IT organizations understand some of the primary similarities and differences amongst APM vendors. To achieve those goals I have invited three APM vendors to the panel. Those vendors are Fluke Networks, NetQoS and CA. I have asked each of the panelists to spend about 15 minutes discussing what it takes for IT organizations to be successful with APM. At the conclusion of the formal presentations we will have a Q&A. I will start the Q&A by asking each of the panelists to discuss how their company is differentiated in the marketplace. After that, I will turn it over to the audience for further questions.

The panel will be held Tuesday, May the 19th from 10:15 to 11:15 in Breakers E. If you are going to be at Interop, I invite you to attend.

Jim Metzler