FactFinder “Rightsizes” Applications on VMs

BlueStripe was contacted by a senior Network Systems Engineer and IT Manager at one of the world’s largest software developers who provides development machines to multiple departments and divisions. The company provides numerous solutions to a global marketplace. All development platforms were provided on virtual machines (VMs).

Business Challenge

The department provides platforms for all development teams and needed to fix problems with deployed platforms and applications. With limited visibility into VMs deployed and with numerous projects running at any given time, when problems occurred they typically provisioned more resources to overcome the problem. Resources were scarce due to this “over-provisioning” approach.

The company has standardized on deploying VMs due to the added flexibility they can provide. At any given time, the firm may have 200+ different VMs deployed with various groups developing on their test systems.

The team knew they needed an improved process for identifying and resolving application issues with these development machines. They required visibility into each development teams' platform including VMs and assistance with troubleshooting problems (triage) to provide faster service and better quality of support. They also needed visibility into the true performance of the application to ascertain the right resources to optimize performance without wasting resources.

In summary, the R&D team deploying VMs to development teams required a solution that could:

• Improve their mean time to application problem resolution by quickly isolating issues
• Provide in-depth performance visibility enabling them to benchmark and rightsize their VMs based on the applications’ requirements
• Prevent “over-provisioning” of VMs to achieve a strong virtualization ROI  

Technical Challenge

The team is responsible for all performance issues including application support, so being able to isolate problems coming from the network, application, hardware, VMs, is a huge benefit.  They need to fix problems without always throwing resources at the problem, but they have limited visibility with VMs deployed.

Tools available were industry standard system management solutions, which allowed IT to see how servers and VMs were performing. This helped in identifying network and hardware issues, but didn’t provide the detailed application performance issues which would enable problem determination for their team. They have mainly Windows applications running in a Windows environment, have standardized on VMware.

The team was accustomed to viewing their infrastructure in terms of hardware; servers, routers, and databases.  What was needed was an in-depth understanding of the applications’ inner-workings, including dependencies, connections, processes running, response times, configurations, and more.

Solution

FactFinder, an Application Service Management solution from BlueStripe, delivers the details of their application infrastructure, no matter where it is deployed or what it is connected to. It will follow the service-levels of the application, wherever it goes, showing how it is performing across the infrastructure, node-by-node. This enabled the team to understand how the development platforms were operating based on the applications’ performance.

FactFinder automatically discovers and maps the entire application infrastructure, highlighting process-level transactions and dependencies end-to-end, while capturing detailed performance metrics to measure application health. This level of insight enables application administrators to quickly recognize their application’s core components across tiers and identify potential performance issues and quickly triage problems when they arise.

FactFinder quickly identified two application problems, allowing the development team to fix the issues, instead of over-provisioning and depleting the available resource pool. Being able to quickly triage and isolate issues, FactFinder also allowed the team to benchmark performance and take a snapshot of the application infrastructure before, during and after its deployment, to keep the performance where it is needed, with the right configuration required.

Benefits

The firm found FactFinder, an Application Service Management solution, could deliver the details of their application infrastructure. FactFinder enabled them to quickly triage the current problem, while also allowing them to benchmark performance and take a snapshot of the existing shape of their application infrastructure.

FactFinder optimizes the limited pool of resources, helping deliver the true ROI promised from moving to VMs for their department. It allows them to “rightsize” their applications to maximize performance, without over-provisioning resources.