Proactive Performance: Short Term and Long Term Features and Benefits
Benefits Increase as the Organization Matures
Proactive Performance Management (PPM) benefits are realized within the first few hours of BEZVision operation. Information Technology groups that are still in the early stages of maturity (i.e. still reacting to problems as they occur) will benefit from the information provided to isolate immediate performance problems. As the organization matures and applies more proactive characteristics of PPM (i.e. problem avoidance), long term benefits provide greater impact and help IT align their goals more closely with the needs of the business.
The following tables illustrate the more salient features, benefits, and effects in both a reactive and then a progressively more proactive application of the BEZ solution.
Reactive (Tactical) Use: Support for Today's Environment
| Feature | Benefit | Effects |
|---|---|---|
| Dynamically develop database of current workloads detailing resource consumption, performance and throughput including complex parallel processing environments | Continuous 'set-and-forget' monitoring of service-level delivery to applications and work groups. Provide service history by workloads. |
Increased Service Delivery Reduced Personnel Time |
| Identify and quantify resource consumers | Provide chargeback accounting | Cost Reduction |
| Compare current delivery against historic usage and alert on user-defined thresholds and anomalies. | Hands-free alerting immediately pinpoints contention. Saves time and shortens MTTR. | Increased Service Delivery Reduced Personnel Time |
| Provide wizards to understand proposed alternative actions. | Provides process for rapid problem identification. | Reduced Personnel Time |
| Evaluate impact of potential solutions. | Walk through potential causes and suggest corrective actions. Evaluate impact of multiple alternatives in real-time before taking any action. | Reduced Personnel Time Cost reduction |
| Prioritize actions to improve performance | Focus on the most critical problems in workloads affecting critical lines of business first | Reduced Personnel time |
| Provide personalized dashboard. | Customized status at a glance. | Increased Service delivery |
| Capture and playback designated time periods (e.g. peek load periods). | Profile peaks for future comparisons. | Increased Service delivery |
Proactive (Strategic) Use: Using Technology to Efficiently Manage IT
| Feature | Benefit | Effects |
|---|---|---|
| Conduct What-If analysis during application development | Service assurance - Manage Growth | Increased Service Delivery Increased Credibility Reduced Personnel Time |
| Conduct What-If analysis in production applications | Manage Growth and Change | Decreased Personnel Time Cost Reduction |
| Compare different architectures and platforms, including OPQ, RAC, SMP, MPP, Cluster and GRID | Predict TCO by evaluating different performance management, database performance optimization and capacity planning alternatives and justify the chosen solution |
Decreased Personnel Time Increased Agility Cost Reduction |
| Optimize database performance | Reduce risk and maximize service delivery | Increased Service Delivery Increased Credibility |
| Assess performance of new applications | Assure acceptable performance during rollout | Increased Service delivery Increased Credibility |
| Framework for organizing a continuous automated performance management process enabling proactive management and control focusing on response time and throughput | Lower risk of change | Increased Service delivery Increased Credibility Increased Agility |
| Develop a continuous process of proactive performance management | Reduce uncertainty and risk of surprises | Increased Service Delivery Reduced Personnel Time |
| Apply predictive technology to evaluate proposed solutions | Justification change of the architecture, new applications, evaluation of the new technologies, including federated databases, Information Integration, providing correlation between Business demand and IT infrastructure | Increased Service Delivery Reduced Personnel Time Increased Agility |
| Predict the impact of new applications on performance of the existing workloads | Reduce risk, lower cost, save staff time, performance assurance |
Increased Service Delivery Reduced Personnel Time Increased Innovation Cost Reduction |
| Predict the ability to support SOX needs during peak activity | No disruption of service | Assured Compliance |
| Evaluate complex parallel processing environment by automating data collection, workload characterization, performance prediction | No disruption of service | Increased Service Delivery Reduced Personnel Time |
| Proactively manage performance of outsourced application development and operation | Forward visibility – the ability to easily do IT planning | Increased Service Delivery Reduced Personnel Time |
| Proactive 'set-and-forget' alerting | Hands-free alerting, immediately potential problem. Saves time and increases MTTF. | Increased Service Delivery Reduced Personnel Time Increased Agility |
| Develop DBA and Capacity Planning recommendations | Plan changes proactively |
Focus personnel efforts Cost reduction |
| Predict the impact of server, data and application consolidation | Quantify Consolidation Initiatives | Increased Service Delivery Cost reduction |
| Justify consolidation projects | Quickly evaluate alternatives | Increased Service Delivery Reduced Personnel Time |
| Proactive predictions | Set realistic performance expectations | Increased Credibility |
| Predict performance of critical applications in case of disaster | No disruption for service – consistent, predictable, cost effective | Increased Service Delivery |
| Predict the impact of database design changes | Data – Information – Decisions | Increased Service Delivery Reduced Personnel Time |
| Compare different architectures and platforms, including OPQ, RAC, SMP, MPP, Cluster and GRID | Predicted TCO by enabling evaluation of the different performance management, database performance optimization and capacity planning alternatives and justifying the solution |
Decreased Personnel Time Increased Agility Cost Reduction |
| Optimize Database performance | Meet or exceed SLAs Reduce risk | Increased Service delivery Increased Credibility |
| Assess performance of new applications | Application rollout assurance | Increased Service delivery Increased Credibility |
| Optimize Database performance | Meet or exceed SLAs Reduce risk | Increased Service delivery Increased Credibility |
| Develop a continuous process of proactive performance management | Reduce uncertainty and risk of surprises | Increased Service Delivery Reduced Personnel Time |
| Apply predictive technology to evaluate proposed problem resolutions | Justify architectural changes, new applications, evaluate new technologies including federated databases, Information Integration, provide correlation between business demand and IT infrastructure | Increased Service Delivery Reduced Personnel Time Increased Agility |
Next: Problem Isolation: Rapidly Addressing Today's Performance Issues