Application Management

The task of managing today's IT environment is vastly more complex as enterprises are demanding real-time infrastructure that responds to business requirements. The frequency of change increases, and configurations and component relationships are becoming increasingly dynamic, making application management even more difficult.

Composite Applications
Business processes are increasingly dependent on composite applications. Composite applications span multiple resources such as Web servers, J2EE application servers, integration middleware and legacy systems. These new complex applications are progressively more strategic for business-critical processes, making application availability and performance top-of-mind concerns. No surprise - building, running and managing these applications is increasingly difficult in direct proportion to complexity.

Business Processes Increasingly Depend On Composite Applications
Today's composite applications enable users to initiate multiple, dynamic transactions. For example, when a user wants to order a book over the Internet, he or she may first perform several searches by title, author, etc. Another transaction is initiated to place books in an electronic shopping basket. Another transaction could recommend similar books that might also be of interest to this user. When the user is ready to finalize the transaction, still more transactions are initiated to verify the customer's order and account information, calculate shipping and tax, verify credit card information and generate an email acknowledgement. Each transaction takes a unique path through the IT infrastructure, making it difficult to identify the true cause of a problem.

Typical Management of Composite Applications
Many organizations attempt to address these challenges by utilizing a variety of point products from different vendors. These point products are not integrated, and cannot provide an end-to-end/holistic view for problem identification, isolation, or resolution. Traditional tools manage individual components of the infrastructure, whereas business processes typically rely on multiple components.

Application Management
In order to effectively manage today's IT composite application problems, IT staff must have integrated tools to track individual transactions from end-to-end to isolate the problem, and then drill-down on the problem area to diagnose the root cause. Resource monitoring can proactively prevent problems by analyzing applications for effective use of resources and forecasting requirements for new applications.

The IBM Tivoli composite application management solutions help quickly isolate, diagnose and fix business-critical transaction performance problems. Proactive monitoring of large-scale deployments and resolving bottlenecks is essential for on demand businesses and can increase availability for web applications, portal solutions, and SOA-based solutions.

IT Challenge	Business Impact
Majority of IT problems are still being identified by end user complaints	Lost business when problems go undetected; impacts customer satisfaction
Composite application performance problems can take many hours to isolate	Support budget spent isolating problems instead of fixing them
Once problem is identified a large team of specialists is required to resolve the problem	Large amount of money from both development and support spent solving problems
Most application problems go back to development group, which cannot recreate the problem	Development budget spent fixing problems instead of building new applications