Interesting Links for July 6th

Links that I have found interesting for July 6th:

• Why Business Transaction Management Is Hot in 2009 – From Chasing Fires to Chasing Value

  CIOs strive to play a strategic role in the business: driving the transformations that produce top and bottom line value. To do so, they need to move past just keeping the lights on, but it is hard to be proactive when you are overwhelmed chasing fires and trying to fix problems.

  How can IT grow from chasing fires to chasing value and enable the CIO to become more strategic?

  First, IT needs to operate and communicate in a business context, not just in a technology context. Second, IT management functions need to evolve from a component focus (end-users, applications and infrastructure) to a business transaction focus, so solving problems and planning is done efficiently and holistically.

  While these two points seem obvious, actually making them happen in a mission-critical, distributed, service-oriented environment that is constantly changing is quite tricky, but it can pay huge dividends.

• Application Performance Management Best Practices Video – In a new video, Peter Sevcik draws on findings from NetForecast's landmark APM best practices benchmarking study of more than 600 enterprises to show how APM best practices deliver performance excellence–and he identifies critical application performance management tool features required to support those best practices. Peter also explains how recent IT infrastructure and application delivery improvements change how application performance must be managed, and describes new APM approaches that address those changes.
• The BAM Blog » Blog Archive » But I’ve Already Got Monitoring – In other words, rather than coping with IT disasters, what about averting them in the first place? A system that constantly monitors your key business activities and transactions, with the ability to connect events together in order to detect variances within your business transactions. Tells you exactly what’s going on in real-time and provides timely warnings.

  For example, your current monitoring systems for processing orders might provide the following information:

  1. Database server OK, ping round trip 0.112s
  2. Database OK, 32 transactions per second, average transaction 1.232s
  3. Web Server OK, 42 connections

  Whereas a system monitoring business events would instead report:

  1. 14 Orders in progress
  2. Average time to process orders is 6.687 seconds
  3. Alert: 13% of orders processed in last 5 minutes were above 9 seconds. Current trend is that an order will breach the SLA of 12.5 seconds within 40 minutes.

• alphaWorks : IBM Page Detailer : Overview – IBM Page Detailer is a graphical tool that enables Web site developers and editors to rapidly and accurately assess performance from the client's perspective. IBM Page Detailer provides details about the manner in which Web pages are delivered to Web browsers. These details include the timing, size, and identity of each item in a page. This information can help Web developers, designers, site operators, and IT specialists to isolate problems and improve performance and user satisfaction.