Another Look at Application Management Appliances
However, when an enterprise management engineer needs new application management products, his first impulse is to turn to software. Deploying software designed to manage applications, however, can require almost as much effort as deploying your typical ERP system -- we are talking months or years.
Application management appliances are often perceived as pricey alternatives designed to gain control of an infrastructure gone awry. Companies ante up the cash necessary to buy appliances that give them deep perspective to execution environments when their backs are against the wall. Drivers for such purchases range from recurring problems that defy diagnosis to composite transactions experiencing perennial performance issues.
Business applications are becoming so complex that even large enterprises are falling short in terms of their ability to manage them. If we use the I.T.IL definition of problems, which is "the unknown root cause of one or more incidents," recent EMA research shows that the percentage of I.T. problems actually solved in many large companies is between zero and 10%.
The traditional "war room" team approach to problem determination is becoming far too expensive to be viable. Instead, companies tend to add horsepower, develop workarounds for recurring problems or turn to the reboot as the management product of choice.
Today's application management appliances are perfectly poised to address these challenges. Their ability to deliver application intelligence via visibility to execution environments will undoubtedly contribute to market share gains as application architectures continue to become increasingly complex.
Compuware, Coradiant and Wily appliances, designed to analyze messages embedded in HTTP traffic, have been...