Information Technology (IT) is increasingly being viewed and managed as a strategic asset of the modern business enterprise. The 1990's have seen significant technological advances enabling friendlier user interfaces, more flexible and robust application packages, increased levels of workflow coordination and automation, and improved processes for serving the customer. Additionally, costs per mip, megabyte, packet, etc. have dropped precipitously justifying substantial investments into these new technologies in order to reap the benefits. However, the returns on these investments have been difficult to predict, measure, and verify.

Network Telemetrics has established a new standard for innovative performance measurement tools, providing real-time, correlated application and network infrastructure metrics that enable IT organizations and service providers to take charge and proactively manage their service level agreements.. NTi’s commitment to developing the most efficient, cost effective End-to-End Performance Measurement tools have been based on the following management precepts:

Service Level Management
The application of Service Level Management (SLM) is an effective way to objectively characterize the levels of performance delivered by various IT services. SLM also enables business managers to correlate specific technology investments with the effects these investments have on end-user performance. This offers the potential for a powerful, closed-loop management process for predicting, measuring, and evaluating the return on IT investment. The use of SLM has the greatest return when focused on those enterprise-wide, mission-critical applications which enable vital business processes such as applications for enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), customer information systems (CIS), and electronic commerce (EC).

Service Level Management (SLM) is a holistic approach to IT infrastructure management. As such, business objectives are aligned with information technology planning and performance management. With SLM, end-to-end application performance is understood in aggregate, as well as by the contribution of each individual service element. IT managers can more successfully budget for improvement and demonstrate their success in meeting objectives. End-users enjoy better service for business-critical applications, and sharper insight into performance vs. investment tradeoffs.

SLM enables proactive IT management instead of simply reacting to day-to-day disruptions. Common ground can be established between end-users and IT organizations where managers can easily measure the contribution of IT to corporate goals and technology investments to strategic business objectives. By integrating an effective SLM solution into the IT infrastructure management process, costs can be better controlled, resources allocated, and expenditures justified on the basis of service level compliance.

The ProView system was designed and optimized to operate in a production environment to automatically monitor service level compliance and end-to-end performance of applications, information systems, and the enterprise network to meet SLM objectives. ProView is unique in its ability to monitor the level of service that is being delivered to the end users and the associated performance of the supporting IT infrastructure. By relating the performance of the infrastructure components to the applications in real-time, direct correlation is automatic so that resolutions of application performance degradations and outages can be quickly determined.

Click here to view a selected set of Service Level Management reports.

Real-Time Performance Measurements
The major differentiation between ProView and other competing products is ProView’s ability to proactively, in real-time, isolate a performance problem between the client, network, ISP, server, database, and application. This feature is extremely important in large enterprise and e-commerce networks where corrective action and critical business decisions must be made without delay. Delayed or ineffective corrective action costs businesses millions of dollars per year. The real-time infrastructure views that are provided by ProView will give back to the IT organizations and service providers the performance visibility they are missing.

Application Response Time and Availability
The measurement of application availability and response time from an end-user perspective are emerging as the key metrics for monitoring delivered services, increasing user productivity, lowering IT costs, and driving more profits to the bottom line.  By continuously monitoring the performance that the user is experiencing in with  networked applications and systems being used, IT organizations and service providers can better manage their service level agreements, control network infrastructures expenditures, improve application performance, and reduce costs.

End-to-End Performance Baselines
Distributed computing in the client/server and Internet paradigms requires a change in the way we collect performance metrics on applications, information systems, and the network infrastructure used to meet business objectives. End user response times and end-to-end availability of applications running on mainframes, midrange computers, UNIX hosts, or servers located throughout the network must be accumulated in real-time to achieve service level objectives.  The lack of meaningful end-to-end performance data makes service level management ineffective, and network managers reluctant to provide service level guarantees.

An end-to-end performance baseline consists of response time and availability data of all critical networked applications as measured from the end user perspective.  By creating and managing an end-to-end performance baseline that applies to all mission-critical end user workgroups or remote sites and their applications throughout the enterprise, we can provide the necessary management that will be required to meet our SLA commitments.

Web-based Service Management
 Web-based reporting is one important way that IT organizations and service providers can demonstrate to their end-users the actual service levels being delivered. It gives network and system managers insight into how their application service delivery environment is actually working. With easy Web access to end-to-end application performance metrics, service quality can more rapidly be improved in their networks. In addition, Web-based Service Management can be used to drill-down into the associated network and system component measurements, which are time synchronized to the application, to help diagnose a service level violation from anywhere with only a browser connection.


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Last modified:  March 1, 2004

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