Optimizing

Internal
Collaboration

With the Customer in Mind

1506025

Effective performance management requires end-user

engagement as well as a strategy to ensure that internal
groups work together efficiently, uniformly, and as one team.

2015 UBM Tech, a division of United Business Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

INSIDE SSS
Performance Management:
Risks and Rewards
Page 2

Performance Management Ingredients:

Technology, Tools, Techniques
Page 5

Building a Dynamic Organization

Page 8

Performance Management:

Risks
and Rewards

Application performance management (APM)

is defined as the monitoring and management of
the availability and overall performance of a software application. Wikipedia loosely defines APM
as the translation of IT into business meaning and
value. Indeed, application performance directly
impacts business value, whether the application in
question is used internally or is a customer-facing
one. In fact, most companies have published servicelevel agreements (SLAs) that are often part of
employee bonus plans or customer business contracts, with fees and penalties if broken.
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In these cases, performance issues

have direct monetary impact. But even
without an SLA, with hundreds of overlapping applications available to end users especially on mobile devices and
the Web youre a click away from customers abandoning your application if
performance issues persist. And, in the
case of internal applications, employees
may not be able to switch away from the
tools and applications you provide, but
they can get frustrated and become less
productive if they experience issues. But
looking at an application just as a piece
of software isnt the full picture. There
are other components, factors, and
views to consider as well.
Beyond the Data Center
When measuring application performance, its important to begin with the
end-user experience. This often involves
assessing end-to-end transactionprocessing time, as well as the average
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transactions per second, or throughput.

Measuring processing time and throughput simultaneously provides insight into
the users experience when your system
is under load.
With the right performance management tools and techniques, you can
accurately identify, understand, and
eventually predict performance issues
and bottlenecks before users see them.
And you can do so for every application
and third-party integration without reinventing your management solution for
each one. This is achievable with a passive, probe-based, and agentless performance monitoring architecture. This
approach to performance management
covers your data center infrastructure
as well as enterprise and mobile applications, on-premises client solutions,
and cloud-based service infrastructure.
The Business Risks of Ineffective APM
Besides the potential financial risk of

missing an SLA target, companies face

other risks when they dont have a
proper performance monitoring and
management strategy. For instance,
you could miss out on business-centric
insight that can help you improve application design and the supporting IT
infrastructure.
Companies face additional risk when
they fail to make sure employees empathize with their end users. When you
dont understand your customers pain,
you may alienate and lose them. Even
if they dont leave, you probably will
lose add-on sales, as customers may
be reluctant to expand their business
relationships with you or refer you to
others. Ultimately, customer alienation
can result in lost revenue, litigation, and
damage to reputation and brand.
Ineffective APM also has ramifications
within your organization. Internal effects
often begin with finger-pointing among
IT, operations, and development groups
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DevOps and APM

Work Together
as to who is to blame for performance
issues. For instance, application developers may point to network traffic, poorly
configured servers, or improperly tuned
databases without looking deeper to determine the root cause of problems.
Conversely, IT support teams may
send every issue to application developers without due diligence to ensure
thats the correct approach. Developers
soon lose confidence in front-line support that cries wolf too often, and the
blame game continues. This situation
becomes a waste of time and energy
that could be better spent resolving the
underlying issues.
In each of these cases, internal staff
members can easily lose faith in the organizations ability to track and resolve
performance issues. If employees arent
engaged in the problem resolution process,
issues can go unresolved, with users left
on their own to find workarounds. These
are the effects of a lack of collaboration.
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The Importance of Collaboration

The agile development methodology
promotes end-user collaboration, development and product management
collaboration, and collaboration with
and among all project stakeholders. The
rapid iteration that agile development
promotes means frequent releases with
regular customer feedback, helping to
meet high-priority user needs quickly.
The result is a development team thats
truly focused on the customer, able to
react fast as needs change or discoveries are made.
When it comes to collaboration techniques for performance management,
the presentation of performance data
and information in a business hierarchy
is important and must be supported by
the underlying business and technology teams. To support an agile software
organization, application performance
monitoring and reporting needs to be
nimble as well. p

DevOps promotes a high level of collaboration among internal development, IT, and
operations teams. Since agile collaboration and processes result in more frequent
software releases, its important to reduce
bottlenecks in the software deployment
process and bring your companys IT teams
into the collaboration and feedback loops.
When your development team is constantly
building and deploying software, your internal IT organization must collaborate on each
release.
But it doesnt stop there. Internal end-to-end
collaboration is just as important, requiring
buy-in from all corners of the organization. It
really begins with executive leadership and
support, continues with the business units,
goes through all of IT, and ends up with the
end user. At each stage, and at every level,
technology is key. It follows that, as collaboration is critical for software development
and deployment, its just as important for
performance management and resolution.
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Performance Management Ingredients:

Technology, Tools,
Techniques
Performance management requires both transaction
and user experience monitoring. Dynatrace, a provider of application performance management tools,
generally defines the user experience as the click-toscreen-update time, including underlying key application metrics. For instance, with SAP, this approach
identifies unique transactions, known as T-Codes. Dynatrace APM helps you develop baselines for application performance with transaction-specific granularity,
correlating these with supporting infrastructure metrics such as network packet loss, client zero window
events, and server data transfer times.
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All of this information is correlated by

time and transaction, with key network
performance indicators. For instance,
when a transaction exceeds a baseline
value, Dynatrace APM analyzes the
delays, the processing time at each
tier, network throughput, and response
time. This data is used to help identify
the fault domain and a proposed solution. If the domain is the network, you
can look deeper at the baseline deviation or drill into packet-level details to
identify the root cause and what user
activity caused it.
This is what Dynatrace calls fault isolation with root-cause analysis, reporting performance metrics using known
application, IT, and business terms. One
example is the satisfaction index, measuring how well the user request was
handled. For transaction performance
management, its not just the quantity of
transactions that matters, but also the
quality from the user perspective.
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Best Practices for APM Success

Beyond tools and technology, techniques and best practices will help you
use these tools for effective collaboration. There are two general approaches:
starting from the top and working down,
and going from the bottom and working up. The top-down approach is user
experience- and transaction-centric;
the common metric here is transaction
performance. For IT, the transaction
measurement becomes the driver of
how actionable the more internal infrastructure measurements are. With it,
you set baselines and look for underlying behaviors causing out-of-tolerance
transaction times.
But its the efficiency of user activity
thats paramount in almost any application. Here, we measure how well the
app is supporting the user, the business
functions themselves, and overall productivity. The baseline measurement
and tolerance values mentioned above,

along with their individual importance,

are based on user experience. Knowing how individual performance issues
impact the business serves as a guide to
prioritize responses.
In contrast, the bottom-up approach
is infrastructure-centric. Here, performance measurements that are out of
tolerance in any component trigger an
alert. While these internal performance
deviations may or may not impact user
experience, they can serve as early
warnings, allowing IT to investigate
before users complain. These two approaches taken together lead to more
effective root-cause discovery of performance issues, appropriate responses
to these issues, and long-term problem
resolution.
How Do Employees Factor In?
When it comes to almost any business
issue, a company is only as good as its
employees how engaged they are
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and how accountable they are when

issues arise. You need to empower
them to fully understand and improve
the end users experience. Ensuring
that your employees are efficient and
effective begins with putting them in the
position to succeed and providing them
with ready access to the information
they need.
For instance, when assigning employees to gather data on performance issue root cause and resolution, take into
account their experience and expectations. Also ensure that the tools theyre
given use a common language, appropriate to their specific roles and responsibilities. Without the right context, your
employees can become isolated and
hamstrung, lacking the vocabulary they
need to collaborate.

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Additionally, it helps to build response

teams appropriate to each problem
based on different employees skills,
expertise, and personality traits. For
example, on issues that require broad
investigation, response teams made up
of employees who have a range of experiences may be preferable to those with
specialized knowledge. In other cases,
where the affected components are well
known, technology specialists may be
better equipped to resolve the issues.
This is where employee enablement
and collaboration make a difference. If
a single APM platform can put end-user
performance information in the hands
of your IT employees for both internally
and externally facing solutions, they can
more effectively collaborate with their
development and business peers. p

Sample Application
Monitoring Checklist
An effective, transaction-centric NPM solution,
such as Dynatrace, should have the following
features:
End-to-end transactional views
Support for application-specific vocabulary, such as SAP-specific T-Codes
A noninvasive, agent-less approach to
performance monitoring
A unified view of application and network
performance issues
The ability to drill down through application and infrastructure tiers
The visualization of activity by transactions, tier, and user
The inclusion of infrastructure such as
load balancers, desktop virtualization, and
server virtualization

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Building a

Dynamic
Organization

In todays IT world, almost everything is virtual and

dynamic, from the desktop to the cloud. As a result, fingerpointing can become embarrassing, since you cant be sure
what youre really pointing at. A solution such as Dynatrace
Data Center Real User Management (DC RUM) is an excellent way to support a dynamic organization built on an IT
infrastructure that can elastically shift overnight as demand
changes. Manual processes and performance investigations
cannot keep up in this environment.
Customers also tend to want to look at a broad portfolio of applications, such as SAP and others. The result is a
blend of varied infrastructure, including WAN technology,
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server virtualization, application servers,

databases, virtual desktop technology, and mobile devices. Dynatrace DC
RUM can monitor and report on each
of these tiers, and its analytics modules
provide the insight needed to help identify transaction-related issues. DC RUM
provides IT staffers with the data they
need, in a language they understand,
and pulls in business and development
teams, too, fostering internal collaboration (see Figure 1, at right).
Value the Users Perspective
Theres value in the partnership that
comes with these solutions, starting
with the different teams inside your
organization, your solution providers, and your customers. A dynamic
IT department is one that cares about
the users point of view, considering all
aspects of a solution and viewing the
network and application performance
management as a single unit, not just
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Figure 1: Application Health Status for SAP

two measurements added together.
Dynatraces solution is more than software. Its a digital performance platform
that helps to make real-time information about digital services and their users
visible to and actionable by everyone in
your organization. It doesnt just monitor
application performance; it helps manage
end-to-end application delivery proactively using advanced analytics and reports.

Fix Issues Before Users Notice Them

In terms of analytics, there are two
main categories. The first is fault
domain isolation analytics, which is
a sophisticated way of looking at all
metrics and baselines. This approach
helps avoid the blame game, as facts
are presented clearly, from the enduser experience through transaction
performance at each network and
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application tier. As a result, you can

zero in on the precise infrastructure,
applications, and components involved. Dynatrace helps pinpoint the
fault and eliminate the rest, so your
employees dont have to.
The second is predictive analytics, where performance reports offer trending analysis. Here, baseline
measurements are evaluated over a
time period to highlight trends. The
power of informative baselines becomes evident when combined with
baseline corridors. This approach
doesnt just give you a basic plot of
performance over time, it provides
a range of normal performance over
time. You end up with the baseline
corridor, a line outlined with a gray
area, illustrating the acceptable tolerance level, which trend reporting
takes into consideration. When both
isolation and predictive analytics are
properly applied, youll know about
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Figure 2: Effective SAP Performance Monitoring Requires End-to-End Visualization

and resolve performance issues before
your customers notice them.
Sometimes these analytics identify
opportunities for improvements that
result in seemingly minor gains in performance, or a reduction in the potential for future issues. While they may
seem small, for larger customers, shaving small amounts of time multiplied by
large volumes of transactions can be
significant in the long term.
Advanced Visualization, in Context
Displaying application and network
metrics is important, but two other

factors are just as vital. The first is the

effectiveness of the visualization (see
Figure 2, above). Dynatrace begins
with higher-level information, allowing
you to drill into the underlying data as
needed, which reduces the chances of
being overwhelmed and going down
the wrong path. Guided information
drill-down views provide insight and
help identify the true root cause without pointing fingers.
The second factor is the context in
which the data is displayed. For example, Dynatrace includes both business
and technical dashboards, each with
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role-based views. Business dashboards

are designed for business management,
or those who care about different
modules as they are applied to the
respective departments that use them.
In contrast, the technical views for IT
are generally server- and tier-specific,
showing precisely where delays and
problems originate or manifest.
Perhaps the most important view,
however, is the end-to-end view, with all
of the transactions and tiers involved in
the applications service delivery chain.
This includes load balancers, middleware, and databases, all available in a
single view. As a result, problems for
a user, a group of users, or a business
suite can be differentiated.
Why Dynatrace?
Customers choose Dynatrace because
of its agent-less approach to performance monitoring, which is noninvasive, works with existing infrastructure
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6.7.16 391_WP_OICWTCIM_UBMagency

from day one, and doesnt require

application modification. It provides
a 360-degree view of the end-user
experience, monitoring from transactions down, and from network and
server infrastructure up. Additionally,
it provides visualization and reporting
with relevant language to help quickly
pinpoint root cause and identify
resolutions.
Further, customers want to look at a
broad portfolio of applications, such
as SAP and others. These solutions
include a blend of infrastructure (LAN
and WAN infrastructure, server virtualization, virtual desktop infrastructure
such as Citrix, and the cloud). Dynatrace DC RUM will analyze all of these
applications, and its analytics modules
give you greater depth and insight than
any other point solution. As a result,
youre able to identify problematic
transactions, their related applications
and components, and network and

infrastructure issues that factor into them.

Dynatrace does this while providing
IT and business teams with what they
need to know in language that each
group understands, with appropriate
reports and visualization supporting
collaboration among internal staff members and with end users. Its this collaboration fostered at many levels within
the Dynatrace APM solution that
ensures your application performance is
superior and your customer experience
is the best it can be. p
About Dynatrace
Dynatrace delivers innovative converged
NPM/APM solutions that empower companies to see their apps and digital channels
from the end-user perspective. Over 8,000
organizations use these insights to master
complexity, gain operational agility, and
grow revenue by delivering amazing customer experiences. For more information,
visit www.dynatrace.com.
Learn more at Dynatrace.com