Target Your Apps

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In this unpredictable Webbed world, getting core business applications to hit acceptable service level targets is no simple task.

Managing multiple protocols while the company migrates to IP is tough enough. Trying to keep costs under control at the same time really tests your skills.

So, if you expect to get your intranet and E-commerce projects moving forward, it's more important than ever to define and demonstrate a bottom line impact on the business. Fortunately, a new class of tools that measures end-to-end IP applications has emerged to compile availability statistics and clock application response times for highly distributed networks.

But tools aren't enough. It's up to you to target which apps are business-critical and, ultimately, to define acceptable service levels.

"In every industry-but especially in established industries like utilities-cost containment is essential," says Bryan Bates, president of Supportnet Consulting Inc., a Calgary, Alberta-based firm that specializes in application management for utilities. "Business and the IT groups have to communicate what their priorities and resource limitations are."

Honeywell Space Systems in Phoenix, a unit of $8 billion Honeywell Inc., takes this lesson seriously. The company's space technology products division is bent on deploying Oracle across its intranet in a way that's meaningful to the business.

The division's first step was recognizing that with users accessing Oracle apps from distributed servers across the corporate WAN, response times were almost guaranteed to be inconsistent. "We needed a way to qualify and quantify performance," says Boyd Conner, a network manager with the space technology products division.

Conner's goal was to identify slowdowns before they had a negative impact on operations and to prove how IT is making it easier for employees to make queries and send information. In the past, Honeywell's support team relied on protocol analyzers to capture traffic data, identifying the app by port number. Conner says that approach delivered inconsistent margins of error, so he looked elsewhere for a tool to fill the void.

He was looking for a way to measure overall response time, but he also wanted to break out network latency and factor in information like network volume to get an accurate performance profile. "There are tools out there to tell how long a query takes at the server, but...