Published: December 06 2010, 09:50 AM | no comments
by Kobi Korsah

That’s why beginning this week (6 December) Kobi Korsah’s blog “CA Technologies on Application Performance Management” will be available on the Service Assurance Daily Web site at www.serviceassurance.com. Coupling his insights on APM with the latest Service Assurance industry and technology news will enable blog readers, industry watchers and customers to better understand how the APM and Service Assurance technologies work in concert to help IT organizations deliver optimized services, keeping end users and customers happy.

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Published: December 06 2010, 09:22 AM | no comments
by Kobi Korsah

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Published: November 18 2010, 03:08 AM | no comments
by Kobi Korsah

Hello again.

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Published: November 08 2010, 01:02 PM | no comments
by Kobi Korsah

This is a silent pandemic. In truth both business and IT leaders have little faith in the quality of their online customer-facing service performance. The results of an independent study, visit http://ow.ly/372g5, clearly indicate business anxiety about the ill effects of poorly performing customer facing services. The findings also show most IT leaders are concerned; but many of them are unsure about how to ease this anxiety. Eighteen months ago CA Technologies embarked upon a unique multi-part research project to understand the magnitude of the problem from both customer and business perspectives; and the urgency associated with solving it. We charted empirical evidence about the effects of web stress on consumers and businesses and explored why it has not been addressed despite clear impact on business outcomes. This most recent study has been carefully crafted to chart the views of 400 business & IT leaders across 14 European countries on satisfying customers, the performance of the complex IT needed to do so; and the impact that both have on business success.

How confident are you that your current online customer-facing service performance meets user expectations?

Only 14 percent of respondents were ‘very confident' their online services would meet user expectations, an overwhelming 83 percent were either ‘not very confident' or ‘somewhat confident'.

Your Goal: Assuring Business Outcomes through Optimal Service Experiences

We were quite surprised to find that some IT decision makers don't yet fully appreciate the magnitude of the problem or urgency associated with it; despite the fact that current systems do not adequately establish the cost to the organisation when services perform poorly.

 Do you believe your current systems allow you to establish the true cost when user-facing web applications perform poorly?

54% of organisations do not believe current systems allow them to establish true cost

Candidly, the enlightened question to ask about those rare and challenging IT incidents which have the potential to damage business is -  when; not if? The other important question is - what can be done to ensure these occurrences are few and far between, and that when they do happen you have a swift and comfortable landing and learn from the experience?

We also discovered that:

• 68% of organisations have not yet adopted a service assurance solution to link real end-user experience, transactions and applications with the underlying systems and network infrastructure supporting them.
• Although 67% of BUSINESS leaders believe monitoring end user satisfaction is more important than ever before; 45% of IT leaders say this is getting tougher as service delivery gets more complex

These insights and many more in the full report provide yet another wake-up call to all business. I would urge you to peruse the compelling results and stark insights by visiting our microsite for the report and more at http://ow.ly/372g5 . Once you have you will be in a very good position to objectively evaluate your organisations appreciation of the magnitude of the problem, gauge the urgency attached to it, audit readiness to tackle it and address any gaps.

Relax, at least now you know you are not alone. The really good news is it doesn't have to be that way.

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Published: October 29 2010, 11:09 AM | no comments
by Kobi Korsah

The size of the challenge

As more sophisticated services (and revenue) increasingly rely on ever more complex service delivery models, any slow downs, incidents or critical situations, or outages become potentially more damaging to the business. In fact the success of every transaction hinges on multiple interdependencies, so whilst conducting simple account queries customers unwittingly travelled through complex models built on a growing maze of interlocking applications, repositories, physical and virtual servers and networks. A single problem in an individual application could create a cascading effect of slowdowns, failures, customer dissatisfaction and loss of revenue. With real end users executing real transactions around the clock and globe, unexpected load patterns were emerging. A more sophisticated form of component-risk dashboard was essential. "How can you possibly eliminate application and infrastructure risks to consistently deliver flawless experiences across multiple channels - without real-time full service-risk intelligence?

What's the first step?

To safeguard your business you must adopt a comprehensive Service Assurance methodology which seamlessly links end-user experience, transactions and services with the underlying systems and network infrastructure supporting them. This requires fully integrated monitoring, analysis and reporting to provide visibility into how well networks, servers and databases are supporting application and service delivery. Whatever path you adopt it should have the flexibility to incorporate performance metrics from myriad domains across mainframe, physical, virtual and cloud. Crucially, it must aggregate and correlate metrics to deliver intelligence about complete services in a business context; so you can prioritize threat elimination according to potential business impact.

For this bank the prime driver for investing in a service performance management solution came at the beginning of 2006. The catalyst was a major push to improve the stability of all its systems, aimed at reducing the number of category one or two incidents. These are the highest grades of business issue, which involve users being affected by a slow or failing system or process. Indeed slow response times and service timeouts were affecting key Branch and Business Internet Banking applications. It quickly became clear that they key to success would be to implement a proactive full service monitoring system which would alert the team to any impending incident and/or that had occurred. The organization needed to find a solution that sat on top of its existing systems and monitored them, across multiple environments such as Websphere, Java and Unix, and allowed it to intervene early to stop a severity one or two incident occurring.

The Solution

After detailed analysis and due diligence the bank chose CA Technologies solution. Within three months a new monitoring infrastructure was designed to improve service visibility - complementing standard dashboards, alerts and reports for applications and infrastructure with a set of custom dashboards. The solution was installed and deployed across branch applications. The resulting service risk-radar has become the de facto service assurance method within the bank, enabling staff to communicate performance, stability and error conditions from a full service perspective. For example it enabled IT to uncover hard-to-find memory leaks in Java applications - a major obstacle to achieving high levels of application availability. The solution also allows application support staff to diagnose the cause of errors that prevent end users from completing web transactions. These kinds of application availability issues typically result in error messages to the user such as ‘404 Not Found', but fail to give staff enough information to get to the root of the problem. The solution implemented gives information on this in real time. "As soon as we deployed we were able to identify the root-cause of problems we couldn't before. A specific example was when our business Internet banking application had a threading problem with one of the application objects. We would not have been able to pinpoint this without our new risk-radar."

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