Application Management

Application Management from IBM

The IBM Tivoli application management solution provides a repeatable way for customers to quickly identify the problem, isolate the source, diagnose the root cause, take corrective action, and then evaluate that the action taken has really resolved the problem. It can help improve availability and performance of mission-critical composite applications, and at the same time improve IT staff productivity. These benefits can be realized by proactively recognizing and preventing performance problems at the end user, and simplifying end-to-end transaction management.

Key benefits include:

• Quick resolution of business-critical application problems to help keep your business up and running
• Improved IT staff productivity through faster problem identification and resolution
• Automated problem isolation, diagnosis and resolution, improves application performance and reduces operations and support costs
• Streamlined management of composite applications in complex IT environments, lowering total cost of ownership
• Prove transaction service level delivered at the end user to meet service level agreements

What makes these benefits possible?

End-to-end transaction tracking for faster problem identification, isolation and problem resolution:

• Provides an end-to-end view of transaction performance across multiple platforms (distributed and z/OS) and subsystems (J2EE, CICS, MQ, IMS, etc.) to isolate the source of performance bottlenecks
• Detects and identifies problems, and if possible, diagnoses what adjustments are needed
• Enables customers to decompose the transaction to a granular level sufficient enough to identify the likely cause and refer to the subject matter expert for resolution
• Allows monitoring of response time from a user's perspective and follows the transaction across the IT infrastructure to quickly isolate problems
• Takes action and implements the adjustment quickly
• Evaluates the effectiveness of the adjustment

Breadth of drill-down support helps you find the root cause of a problem faster:

• Supports root cause analysis across applications, systems, network and security devices
• Allows users to drill-down for root cause analysis, e.g. application memory leak detection, lock/contention analysis, transaction tracking and decomposition, application trace, bottleneck analysis and event detection, which all decrease time to problem resolution
• Supports common drill-down requirements: J2EE, MQ, DB2, CICS, IMS, Siebel and SAP
• Includes deep-dive problem identification for WebSphere Application Server, BEA WebLogic, WebSphere MQ and other environments
• Provides a historical performance trend analysis to help understand current capacity and project future growth of systems and applications

Robust functionality that helps improve composite application availability and reduce the cost of downtime:

• Measures and reports availability and response time delivered to end users as well as response time of live Web server
• Simulates and tracks transactions while comparing against threshold response times
• Allows you to visualize the transaction as it crosses your enterprise and interactively isolate the problem area using transaction topology graphical depiction
• Provides data and event feeds to Tivoli Service Level Advisor, Tivoli Enterprise Console and Tivoli Business Systems Manager to provide a rich set of information to reduce downtime and improve tracking
• Provides common tools to manage Web, distributed and mainframe resources
• Intuitive browser-based user interface and automated installation for optimized time-to-value

Best-of-breed J2EE management:

• Enables operators to quickly resolve problems in mission-critical applications to protect web application revenue streams and customer satisfaction
• Provides full visibility into health of J2EE environments from both transactional and resource-based views

Integration with Rational development and testing tools helps improve the quality of applications and supports the software lifecycle from end to end:

• Integrates with Rational products to better facilitate the flow of performance information from operations teams to testing and development groups
• Allows problems to be identified and resolved during development or testing before applications are deployed into production, and provides production-gathered data feeds directly back to the developer's desktop for deep problem analysis and software repair

Interoperability with existing tools and applications:

• Support for leading open standards such as Java and XML
• Leverages both IBM and non-IBM infrastructures
• Enhances application availability by tying all critical components together

One stop shop:

• IBM addresses all aspects of application lifecycle management, from development, test and deployment to production problem determination and optimization
• Single source solutions provider delivers unparalleled offering with both breadth and depth, as well as experience
• Provides easier deployment and helps lower cost of ownership
• Modular solutions - so that you can address your most immediate needs now, and then deploy additional components as your needs warrant, to achieve a complete solution over time