For application performance monitoring (APM), many in IT tend to focus a significant amount of their time on the tool that performs the analysis. Unfortunately for them, the battle is won or lost at the data access level. If you don’t have the right data, you can’t fix the problem correctly.
This viewpoint is backed up by an APMdigest post back in August where Jim Frey cited some critical survey research. The research showed that "26% reported that their biggest challenge with incident response is that data exists, but they can’t access or analyze it easily." Key point – you need access to the right data at the right time to solve your problems.
This begs the question — how do I get the right data access?
The best source of data is from a network tap. A tap makes a complete copy of ALL the data passing through it. It is a passive device, so it does not alter any of the data and has a negligible effect on transmission time.
Taps are great because they are "set and forget." You simply plug the device into the network with a one-time disruption and you are done. No programming is required. Best of all, you can place taps anywhere in the network that you need data from — ingress, egress, remote offices, etc.
The one drawback to using taps is that if you install lots of them (which you will want to do), the amount of data feeds can overload the input ports to your APM tools. However, this issue is easily resolved by installing a network packet broker (NPB) to aggregate the data from the taps, filter the data as necessary, and then send that data on to the APM tool. This eliminates the overcrowding of the data ports on your APM tool.
An alternative to a tap is to use a mirroring port (also referred to as a SPAN port) off of your network switches. However, this is not recommended. One reason is that these ports are active devices, i.e. they can materially change data packet characteristics as the packets flow through the device. This is especially important when using data from these ports to diagnose problems.
In addition, bad packets (i.e. malformed packets) are dropped by the SPAN port. This ends up giving you a "digital view" of the situation, i.e. everything is fine and then there is a problem. Missing packets that could show degradation prior to data loss (which could have been useful to create a quicker diagnosis) is missing, along with any context as to what was happening before the problem began.
In the end, optimum data capture can be achieved using a tap and NPB. This results in a faster mean time to repair (MTTR).
The Latest
APMdigest and leading IT research firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) are partnering to bring you the EMA-APMdigest Podcast, a new podcast focused on the latest technologies impacting IT Operations. In Episode 2 - Part 1 Pete Goldin, Editor and Publisher of APMdigest, discusses Network Observability with Shamus McGillicuddy, Vice President of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA ...
CIOs have stepped into the role of digital leader and strategic advisor, according to the 2023 Global CIO Survey from Logicalis ...
Synthetic monitoring is crucial to deploy code with confidence as catching bugs with E2E tests on staging is becoming increasingly difficult. It isn't trivial to provide realistic staging systems, especially because today's apps are intertwined with many third-party APIs ...
Recent EMA field research found that ServiceOps is either an active effort or a formal initiative in 78% of the organizations represented by a global panel of 400+ IT leaders. It is relatively early but gaining momentum across industries and organizations of all sizes globally ...
Managing availability and performance within SAP environments has long been a challenge for IT teams. But as IT environments grow more complex and dynamic, and the speed of innovation in almost every industry continues to accelerate, this situation is becoming a whole lot worse ...
Harnessing the power of network-derived intelligence and insights is critical in detecting today's increasingly sophisticated security threats across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure, according to a new research study from IDC ...
Recent research suggests that many organizations are paying for more software than they need. If organizations are looking to reduce IT spend, leaders should take a closer look at the tools being offered to employees, as not all software is essential ...
Organizations are challenged by tool sprawl and data source overload, according to the Grafana Labs Observability Survey 2023, with 52% of respondents reporting that their companies use 6 or more observability tools, including 11% that use 16 or more.
An array of tools purport to maintain availability — the trick is sorting through the noise to find the right one. Let us discuss why availability is so important and then unpack the ROI of deploying Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) during an economic downturn ...
Development teams so often find themselves rushing to get a release out on time. When it comes time for testing, the software works fine in the lab. But, when it's released, customers report a bunch of bugs. How does this happen? Why weren't the flaws found in QA? ...
