Application Management is Main Priority for IT Staff This Year

ChannelBiz UK — Thu, 03 May 2012 12:47:47 -0400

Application performance management is a priority for IT staff in 2012 as end user numbers grow and demand for better services shoots up. However, research by Quocirca has shown that IT executives, particularly CIOs, are not confident that they will be able to meet increasing user demand...

Prelert Predicts Application Performance Issues

Prelert — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 14:15:37 -0400

Because it leverages advanced pattern detection algorithms, Prelert is more likely to catch the early warning signs of an impending performance incident. Here's how it works.

Most predictive analytics packages rely on regression analysis to look at trending metrics and project a future event. Of course this works best when there is a steady progressive increase or decrease in a metric that can easily be extrapolated to a future threshold.

Prelert, on the other hand, learns the normal patterns of activity in a monitored environment and uses a 'heat map' dashboard to highlight anomalies in those patterns. In nearly ...

APM and the Detectives

Rich Collier (rcollier) — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 14:34:39 -0400

The Chicago Police Department turbocharged their detective work by putting in action an advanced pattern-recognition software system. Created by computer scientists at DePaul University, Classification System for Serial Criminal Patterns (CSSCP) uses artificial intelligence to cull massive amounts of data. Pulling out details of individual crimes, such as the assailant's age, sex, height, location of the crime, weapons and vehicle used, creates a criminal profile that can be compared with crimes. While detectives are skilled at identifying these patterns, the overwhelming volume of data available in a city the size of Chicago decreases their probability of finding every potentially related crime.

A.I. systems, on the other hand, work 24 hours a day without human intervention, sorting through thousands of criminal records per second, revealing patterns in seemingly unrelated crimes that a mere mortal could miss. In a study using three years of Chicago police robbery data, the algorithms were able to detect at least 10 times as many related crimes as a team of detectives with access to the same data.

It turns out that detective work is very much like APM troubleshooting. Support engineers cannot simply look at pre-defined KPIs to find the culprit. They must consider all of the potential “suspects” (metrics). But the pool of possible metrics that could be relevant can range in the tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands. Giving ample consideration to each potential relationship is simply too time consuming.

Prelert also leverages A.I.-based machine learning and pattern detection technologies. It culls through massive amounts of data, pulling out interesting ‘features’ and attributes in the data and uses advanced correlation and pattern matching algorithms to generate a short list of likely suspects (metrics). These suspects can then be brought in by the detective (support engineer) for further interrogation and examination in order to determine their relevance and role in a particular “crime” (performance issue). In practice, Prelert proves itself again and again to reduce the time it takes APM ‘detectives’ to find the villain from hours and days to minutes.

Amazon outage one year later: Are we safer?

Homepage — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 08:03:37 -0400

Amazon Web Services last April suffered what many consider to be the worst cloud service outage to date - an event that knocked big name customers such as Reddit, Foursquare, HootSuite, Quora and others offline, some for as many as four days. Are we any safer today?

Big Data's Big Problem: Little Talent

online.wsj.com — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 06:43:56 -0400

Hillary Martin, Chief Scientist for Bit.ly says that it seems that the markets are as much in love with "Big Data"—the ability to acquire, process and sort vast quantities of data in real time—as the technology industry. However, according to a report published last year by McKinsey, there is a problem. "A significant constraint on realizing value from Big Data will be a shortage of talent, particularly of people with deep expertise in statistics and machine learning, and the managers and analysts who know how to operate companies by using insights from Big Data,"...

Prelert Diagnostics Free Trial Download

Prelert — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 11:25:46 -0400

Mike Sargent, general manager, Enterprise Management, CA Technologies said, “We are pleased to be working with Prelert to provide our customers with a new dimension of predictive management so they can easily attain even higher levels of IT operations efficiencies that drive better business outcomes.”

SLIDESHOW: Who Was Hiring in Silicon Valley in March?

Business News — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 11:09:38 -0400

Click through the slideshow attached to this story to see who is hiring and what types of jobs are being filled in the San Jose, San Francisco-Peninsula, East Bay and Santa Cruz regions...

AI and the Future of Application & Infrastructure Management

Kevin Conklin (kevinconklin) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 11:01:14 -0400

Gartner's Will Capelli has a new blog (AI in IAM) where he explores the role of artificial intelligence in Infrastructure and Application Management. In a recent post he points out the trend toward two tiered analytics.

In the first tier application and infrastructure monitoring tools structure the data in the dimensions of time and relationship within the IT architecture. In the second tier products like Prelert use predictive analysis and machine learning techniques to uncover behavior patterns that IT can use to improve operational efficiency and reduce service incidents.

With Will's usual flair, he relates this approach to basic human knowledge processing evoking Immanuel Kant's classic Critique of Pure Reason. The post is a great read and the blog should prove to be thought provoking.

Here is the link to the blog post

Prelert Joins CA Technologies Technology Partner Program

Press Release Distribution — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 10:42:54 -0400

"The complex application environments behind today’s on-line services pose a Big Data problem for the IT teams that support them. There is simply too much data for humans to efficiently process,” explains Mark Jaffe, Prelert CEO. “Prelert provides the industry’s only predictive analytics solution that is fully selflearning, installs in hours and immediately exposes powerful insights currently hidden in overwhelming volumes of data. We are excited to continue working with a leader in enterprise management solutions as we expand support for additional CA Technologies solutions”...

Finally! Things Are Looking Up for IT Spending, Survey Finds.

AllThingsD — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 12:21:30 -0400

The optimizm is a bit more pronounced when you see it expressed in the graphic below, which I grabbed from raw survey results. More than two-thirds of the CIOs surveyed said they planned to boost their overall IT spend this year, most of them by a modest 1-5 percent, but some by more than 10 percent...

Spot Market Cloud Pricing. What Are They & Why Should You Care?

ZDNet Asia — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 02:41:41 -0400

The most famous cloud spot market today is Amazon's Spot Instances, where users can set the maximum amount they are willing to pay per server hour, and Amazon gives them an instance for as long as the instance price is below that limit. By taking a quick look at the pricing table on the link above, it is possible to see that the prices are much lower than the price of a full instance...

AI and IAM: Will Two-Tier Analytics Become the Norm for IAM?

wcappell — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 10:51:13 -0400

One sign that this is a correct prognostication will be the success of alliances between performance monitoring vendors delivering CEP or SDB functionality (e.g., ExtraHop, Nastel, Optier) with vendors that focus on discovering causal patterns in existing data sets (e.g., Prelert, Verdande, Netuititve.)...

Do Management Consultants Obscure IT Transformation?

SOA World Magazine — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 14:44:00 -0400

Somewhere in between the foggy mists of management consultancy jargon and the babbling verbiage of business analytics specialists there may, quite possibly, lay an untouched land where real business change discussions take place. The problem with business change and IT innovation is that it too often succumbs to the hijacked efforts of non-technical management figures who fail to understand the real issues at the coalface of application transformation, IT performance management and data optimization...

Cloud Computing: Appirio Gets a Whopping $60 Million Investment

SOA World Magazine — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 13:21:04 -0400

It's got 300 customers including plums like the City of Los Angeles, Facebook, Twitter, Flextronics, Home Depot, Japan Post Network, L'Oreal, NetApp, New York University, Starbucks, Thomson Reuters and VMware. It may be the largest single round investment ever put in a cloud start-up. At least Appirio thinks so...

The Best SLA Ever

David Strom — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 14:02:00 -0500

You no doubt are somewhat cynical about service level agreements (SLAs), those little-reviewed documents that promise the level of service from your hosting provider. Little-read that is, until something goes awry. Enter SingleHop, a Chicago-based provider that is trying to make a name for itself by actually delivering a solid "Bill of Rights" for customers and promising to pay when they don't meet their SLA. It is an interesting idea. Sponsor There are lots of other providers that do offer payouts for missed service milestones, of course. But I liked the way they are making it easy to see their ...

The APM Approach: Adapt or Die

itweb.co.za — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 03:30:15 -0500

It didn't take long for infrastructure and operation managers to realize that the traditional silo approach wasn't sufficient anymore, and that APM had to adapt to the new service-oriented model. To put it in context, who is to blame if a company has a typical multitier architecture, with monitoring tools reporting 99.999% availability at each layer, yet the customer continues to experience service interruption? Now, more than ever before, it is important for IT to deliver on continued service excellence, end-to-end, knowing exactly what effect an interruption in one layer has on the overall service to the business...

Five Things CIOs Must Do for Effective Data Center Capacity Planning

Computer Technology Review — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 19:36:09 -0500

Data Center Infrastructure Management -- or DCIM -- is on everyone’s minds these days, and for good reason. According to Forrester Research, DCIM is expected to grow to 60 percent market penetration by 2014, up from just one percent market penetration in 2010. While I’m often skeptical about industry prognostications, the following major trends out there that will fuel DCIM adoption are undeniable...

Application Performance Management (APM) vs. Network Performance Management (NPM)

SOA World Magazine — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 17:13:00 -0500

Another three-letter acronym I see frequently mixed in with APM is NPM which stands for Network Performance Management. At first glance they look very similar. The distinction appears very subtle with just a one letter difference, but it speaks volumes because their core technologies and approaches to monitoring application performance are fundamentally different...

Moving Into the Real World: Predictive Analytics Improves Decision Making

APMdigest — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:01:28 -0500

A major and rapidly evolving area of focus of this energy is the application of predictive analytics to anticipate and solve tough business and operational problems that threaten the quality of delivered services...

IDC: Predictive Analytics Goes Mainstream in 2012

Pete Goldin — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 10:37:54 -0500

Operational complexity in virtualized, scale-out, and cloud environments and composite Web-based applications will drive demand for automated analytic performance management and optimization tools that can quickly discover, filter, correlate, remediate, and ideally prevent performance and availability slowdowns, outages, and other service-interrupting incidents...

Accommodating BYOD And Other IT 'Myths'

zdnet.com — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 08:55:30 -0500

Last month, Cisco published a survey that found many IT and HR departments have started considering encouraging the BYOD trend, among others, as competitive advantages when hiring young professionals, in particular. However, this might actually be a myth, according to a new study published by Avanade, a business technology solutions and managed services provider...

Video: The Sh*t End Users Say

IT news, technology analysis and how — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:13:20 -0500

You've heard of 'The Sh*t Girls Say' and 'The Sh*t Guys Say'. You've gotta see 'The Sh*t IT End Users Say'. Hilarious and well worth the 2 minute run time

This Is The Reason Cloud Computing Hasn't Taken Off Yet

Business Insider — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:41:00 -0500

Certainly, the business world at large is interested in the benefits of the cloud, but enterprises have been very slow to adopt a key element of cloud computing: platform-as-a-service or PaaS. For the business world to fully embrace the cloud, they have to overcome a huge hurdle –getting their “core”/legacy/custom-developed applications to the cloud. This is where PaaS comes into play. PaaS provides the necessary cloud capabilities that allow enterprises to fully embrace custom application development through lowered infrastructure costs, less strain on existing resources and the ability to push IT to innovate rather than maintain. The primary problem, however, ...

The Year of Hybrid Cloud?

Wired.com — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:19:46 -0500

Given the surge in client interest lately in adopting and exploiting the technology and business benefits of hybrid cloud computing, I’m predicting 2012 will be the Year of Hybrid Cloud. Client-driven requirements will grow more aggressive and will link closer to measures of business agility and cost efficiency...

Prelert Drives Introscope Expansion at Large Bank

Scott — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 13:20:46 -0500

One of the Northeast’s largest regional banks had only deployed Introscope on half of its on-line banking environment. Support teams were not leveraging Introscope’s rich data and the application architects were advocating pulling Introscope out of the environment due to a lack of use.

Prelert became involved to help the bank solve business risk issue they'd been struggling with for 11 months. Their fault tolerant design of their on-line banking environment involved a backup datacenter. Unfortunately, each time they'd tested the failover, the application would gradually degrade and then crash.

Prelert was fed 3 days of data from Introscope's SmartStor that surrounded a recent event. It's artificial intelligence based self-learning analytics processed the hundreds of millions of data points, learned the behavior of every metric, and identified anomalous activity patterns related to the issue that involved 5 of the 500 JSPs.

Of course the bank was impressed with how quickly Prelert identified the cause of the issue and decided to purchase. But the really interesting outcome was that Prelert's self-learning analytics and out-of-the-box intuitive dashboard convinced the architects that they would be able to now leverage Introscope's awesome instrumentation. Instead of arguing to remove Introscope they are now expanding it's deployment.

Feel free to contact me at slkessler@prelert.com to see how we can help expand your deployments.

Service Assurance & Application Performance in a Consumer Driven World

Michael Sargent — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:40:00 -0500

To deliver services that meet user expectations, you have to know where the potential trouble spots are in advance. IT managers need to be able to follow the path of transactions as they pass from the mobile apps or browsers, through back-end systems that support processing, and back again. This is the only way to eliminate the division between monitoring the application and the infrastructure. By relentlessly monitoring transaction flows, the IT team can isolate the choke points, address them proactively, and eliminate finger-pointing between functional teams over responsibility for performance issues...

Predictive Analytics In Your Data Center

APMdigest — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 11:31:09 -0500

You need better visibility into you how your applications and business services are correlated with your dynamic infrastructure, so you can track irregular behavior to topology changes. And, you need an easier way of determining acceptable thresholds and real anomalies. Much like the advanced analytics used by today’s hurricane forecasters, Predictive Analytics offers a smarter way to manage IT so you can anticipate IT problems before they occur...

How Not to Get Fired from IT in 2012

Technology Jobs Search — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:44:58 -0500

If painful, headline-making outages happened this year to some of the most well-heeled IT shops in the world -- Apple (News - Alert), RIM, Amazon, Bank of America – you must assume it can happen in your department.

Application Performance Management Still An IT Challenge

cioinsight.com — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 11:22:08 -0500

Despite increased investments in IT tools to manage business applications and transactions, enterprises are still struggling with transaction availability and the growing complexity of their IT infrastructure, according to a survey of more than 125 IT executives. the survey found that 68 percent have invested in more than three distinct application and transaction management tools. Regardless of that investment, 71 percent of the businesses surveyed still could not pinpoint the source of business-impacting slowdowns...

Resistance Is Futile: IT Will Love Consumerization Too

infoworld.com — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 07:09:11 -0500

It's only a matter of time until the consumerization of IT bleeds over from your non-IT employees into your IT department. Although this may sound far-fetched, iPad-like systems such as appliances and workload-optimized systems are finding a foothold in your data center, and the trend has only started...

IT Automation and Application Performance in 2012

Bharzog — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 08:18:22 -0500

VMware is going to make progress on its automated service assurance vision this year, with initial steps coming in the Q1/2012 version of vCenter Operations and the initial release of vFabric APM. On the third party vendor front, progress is most likely to come by partnerships between vendors who have interesting pieces of the puzzle. On this front the most interesting vendors are Prelert, Blue Stripe, Netuitive, ExtrHop Networks, and VMTurbo...

Gartner's 5 Dimensions of APM

APMdigest — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 13:14:38 -0500

Gartner's recently published Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring defines “five distinct dimensions of, or perspectives on, end-to-end application performance” which are essential to APM, listed below. Gartner points out that although each of these five technologies are distinct, and often deployed by different stakeholders, there is “a high-level, circular workflow that weaves the five dimensions together.”...

Survey of CIOs: Cloud, SaaS, Consumerization Expose IT Blind Spots

ComputerWeekly.com — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 11:01:35 -0500

Business models such as cloud computing and trends such as the consumerization of IT, social media and mobility are exposing performance blind spots in IT management, a CIO survey has revealed. A lack of transparency in the performance of cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) is adversely affecting the ability of IT departments to support the business, according 64% of over 500 CIOs who were polled by technology performance firm, Compuware...

The Five Signs That an Application is Ripe For the Cloud

Bert Huelman — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 17:00:00 -0500

When you're in the process of establishing your cloud architecture, figuring out what can be moved to the cloud, and when it should be moved, is job one. That can seem like a daunting task, depending on the size of your organization, the number of applications in use, the complexity of your network architecture, and so on. But it's not as hard as it first seems. You can kick start your cloud migration by looking for applications that share some or all of these five characteristics.. Apps that are already virtualized Apps that are loosely coupled and modular in their ...

London Wires Up for 2012 Olympic Games

CIO.com — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 08:34:47 -0500

IDG News Service — While London's massive Olympic park is still very much a frenetic construction site, IT engineers are fine tuning the equipment that will be used to transmit scores, let athletes send e-mail and transmit high-definition ...

Application Performance & Delivery In The Cloud

itbusinessedge.com — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 11:48:04 -0500

A good way to look at application performance & delivery in the cloud is as another data center architecture tier, says F5's Lori MacVittie. This is crucial for enterprises looking to gain true efficiency from the cloud rather than mere economies of scale because it provides the ability to maintain performance levels and uptime across public and private infrastructure...

Hybrid clouds 2012: the private cloud myth lives

The Register — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 10:59:35 -0500

Marketeer snake oil for scared CIOs Hybrid clouds are all the rage in cloud computing today, with Gartner naming them "a major focus for 2012", even as hybrid clouds constitute fully 20 per cent of enterprise clouds today. But are they really anything more than a new face on private clouds? Marten Mickos, chief executive of private cloud company, Eucalyptus Systems , doesn't think so.…

Shortage of Mainframe IT Skills Creates Dangerous Risks

IT PRO — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 05:32:14 -0500

Mainframe application outages cost nearly $14,000 per minute in lost revenue according to the survey among 520 CIOs in enterprises of over 1,000 employees by Vanson Bourne...

6 Steps to Transition to the Private Cloud

onlinetech — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 06:00:03 -0500

When a company decides they want to transition to a private cloud, there are a few important steps they need to take to get started...

Do Moneyball Style Analytics Work for APM?

Rich Collier (rcollier) — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:42:21 -0500

Perhaps one of the best quotes from the book (and movie) Moneyball is "we aren't allowing ourselves to be victimized by what we see". In other words, the premise (and promise) of Sabermetrics is that analytics can yield results that may not otherwise be obvious. Humans aren't inherently good at statistics, so analytics can supplement what the human cannot easily do. And, if you've read the book, seen the movie, or have at least casually watched baseball in the last few years, you may have noticed that having a massive payroll and star players does not guarantee success. There is, of course, a decent analogy here for Application Performance Management. The mere fact that an APM tool exists - or that there are humans setting up its rules and interpreting its output - does not necessarily guarantee a successful yielding of the information that is possible by using Analytics.

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