Watch This! Google Hangout: Using Application Performance Diagnostics Tools to Increase the Effectiveness of Shift-Left Testing

How many times do software developers need the ability to debug their application on a live server? Most developers have great code profiling tools used against their local development working environment, though are often challenged to get similar data from a fully deployed application environment. The unit tests may have passed and given good results in the local development environment, though has issues in the fully deployed environment.

We at Prolifics are using the newly released IBM Application Diagnostics Lite tool to provide our own and customers software developers a quick easy tool to use in troubleshooting issues on a single application server running IBM WebSphere and Portal. This tool provides a quick deployment to provide insight into the execution of requests running on the App Server, for real time viewing or recording for offline review. Our WebSphere and Portal developer, architects and administrators are always interested in new and valuable troubleshooting tools.

One of the best features of APD Lite, is that it is a free download from IBM, only requiring a valid ID on the IBM.com website. You can carry this tool on a USB memory stick and provide quick value to your project.

I  recently participated in a Google Hangout with IBM experts where we discussed the benefits of IBM's application performance diagnostic tools and how they can help application teams reduce time and effort associated with shift-left testing.

Click here to watch!

Abstract: 
The purpose of shift-left testing is to reduce costs by identifying and eliminating issues earlier in the application development life cycle. Compare that to the purpose of application performance diagnostics tools, which is reduce the time and effort required to identify and resolve issues, and it's easy to see how these tools could provide value when used as part of one's shift left testing practices. Join Redmonk Analyst Donnie Berkholz as he leads a discussion with IBM and Prolifics experts on the how IBM's application performance diagnostic tools can help application teams test their code early and often. We'll discuss the concept of shift-left testing and identify use cases in which tools can be used to reduce the time and effort necessary to effectively implement shift-left testing.

Roundtable panelists:

• Dan Kern, Solution Architect, Prolifics
• Donnie Berkholz, RedMonk Analyst
• Dan Berg, IBM Chief Architect at DevOps
• Lindsay Farmer, Release Manager, Application Performance Diagnostics
• Joydeep Banerjee, Architect, Application Performance Diagnostics
• Todd Kindsfather, Product Manager, Application Performance Diagnostics

Want to connect? Email me at dkern@prolifics.com.

To learn more about Prolifics, visit www.prolifics.com.

Dan Kern is a Solution Architect at Prolifics and an IBM Champion for Tivoli. Dan joined Prolifics as a Senior WebSphere Administrator and Performance Tuning expert. Over the past 7 years, he has held roles as a Technical Solution Director, Practice Director for the Automation and Systems Management area and now helps customers realize the full potential of their software investments as a Solution Architect. Dan is highly regarded in the Tivoli SAPM product and business areas and continues his focus on top quality solutions.

IBM Pulse Session Preview: Simplifying Administration and Maximizing Time-to-Value with SmartCloud Application Performance Management

In less than 2 weeks, I will be representing Prolifics at IBM Pulse 2013. I am looking forward to attending keynotes and sessions, speaking with industry experts and meeting attendees at Prolifics' booth, but I am most looking forward to presenting in two sessions focused on Application Performance Management.

I am hosting my first session at the start of the conference on Sunday, March 3. During this session, we will explore how our clients have achieved a quick time-to-value, and vastly simplified administration, when deploying IBM SmartCloud APM to monitor their middleware infrastructure by taking a unique approach. Attendees will learn how we simplified the often complex management aspects, and reduced implementation time, by leveraging the APM UI; eliminating the need for Managed System Lists (MSLs) by leveraging the little-known Situation Groups; and how they addressed the unique challenges of monitoring a pooled WebSphere Application Server infrastructure.

To learn more about my speaking session and to see what else Prolifics has lined up for IBM Pulse, click here.

If you are interested in learning more about IBM SmartCloud, I have included a video by Prolifics' APM Practice Director and IBM Champion for Tivoli, Dan Kern. In this video, Dan discusses increasing the availability, visibility and virtualization of business-critical applications with IBM SmartCloud solutions.


For more information about Prolifics, please visit: www.prolifics.com.

Brian Fisher is a Solution Architect at Prolifics focusing on monitoring and application performance management. He is a Technical Sales Specialist equipped with six years of innovative portfolio experience serving a broad base of IBM Tivoli clients, as well as sales specialists.

Expectations for Pulse 2012

IBM Pulse 2012 will offer new opportunities to learn about IBM’s ongoing initiatives around integration between their numerous products lines. The Tivoli product line continues to become more integrated with Rational, WebSphere and Lotus brands. Existing integrations between products such as IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for Application Diagnostics (ITCAMforAD) and Transactions (ITCAMforTrans) and Rational Performance Tester (RPT) will be augmented with further extensions of the already powerful integration between ITCAM for SOA and WebSphere Registry and Repository (WSRR). Centers of Excellence are in place at many key Fortune 500 companies and products from the IBM portfolio that support this effort continue to be leaders in their technology areas.

Expanded integration with SOA environments is an area of particular interest for Prolifics, given our strong focus, proven record of success and acclaimed expertise in the areas of Technical Monitoring, Governance and Business Process Management (BPM). Prolifics is uniquely positioned among IBM Business Partners to deliver world class architecture and deployment services in this extremely complex business and technical area.

To see what Prolifics will be up to at Pulse 2012 click here.

Dan Kern joined Prolifics as a Senior WebSphere Administrator and Performance Tuning expert. Over the past 7 years, he has held roles as a Technical Solution Director, Practice Director for the Automation and Systems Management area and now helps customers realize the full potential of their software investments as a Solution Architect. Dan is highly regarded in the Tivoli SAPM product and business areas and continues his focus on top quality solutions.

Considerations When Monitoring IBM DataPower

Effective and comprehensive monitoring of SOA environments that leverage the power, and complexity, of IBM DataPower appliances requires a multi-tiered approach. The various appliances deliver enhanced security, message transformation and routing and as key components of business critical applications, require close attention to insure high availability in all regards.

Coverage for DataPower appliances must include monitoring of services and resources. While the appliances expose a good number of metrics through SNMP MIBs, monitoring of the services they provide allows proactive alerting, to both Consumer and Provider communities. Operational teams focused on the health of the appliances must be informed of any issues related to the appliances themselves, such as power, cooling and hardware errors to proactively address any degradation in performance or availability.

Service monitoring of the appliances starts with engaging the application teams, Consumers and Providers, to establish the Service Level Agreement for the deployed services. Live traffic is then analyzed and factored against the requested response times and availability levels for all subscribed Services and Operations. This additional level of validation allows more comprehensive tuning and distribution of alerts, increasing service and operation availability and reducing Mean Time To Resolve (MTTR) in case of performance degradation.

DataPower appliances are most often monitored by a combination of agents, such as those supplied by IBM as part of the Tivoli Composite Application Management for SOA (ITCAM for SOA) Platforms package. ITCAM for SOA includes agents to monitor both Service execution and Resource Usage of the appliances, supplying invaluable data and insights to Operations, Application Support and Software Development teams. The Services and Resource agents are most often deployed on the same remote server and poll the appliances via SOMA and SNMP protocols. This architecture allows more centralized deployment and reduces license cost.

The monitoring team interfaces with a variety of teams, from Network Security, DataPower Support and Enterprise Architecture, SOA Governance and Application teams. Each operational team provides their own level of expertise to the architecture and deployment effort and their involvement helps insure a solid and well supported deployment.

Application teams in SOA environments are heavily invested in the success and availability of their services, so the overall effort will benefit from their early and frequent involvement. ITCAM for SOA provides unique insight into Consumer and Provider service response time and can assist in validation of the business logic and rules driving service architecture and deployment.

Dan Kern joined Prolifics as a Senior WebSphere Administrator and Performance Tuning expert. Over the past 7 years, he has held roles as a Technical Solution Director, Practice Director for the Automation and Systems Management area and now helps customers realize the full potential of their software investments as a Solution Architect. Dan is highly regarded in the Tivoli SAPM product and business areas and continues his focus on top quality solutions.

Building an Enterprise Application Integration Solution

Rajiv Ramachandran, Practice Director, Enterprise Integration / Solution Architect

Having an integration infrastructure that connects all enterprise systems to one another and provides seamless and secure access to customers, partners, and employees is the foundation of a successful enterprise. I have been involved with a lot of customers discussing their EAI architectures. More often than not, I have noticed that the approaches considered to implement such an architecture are not complete and do not provide the benefits that may be achieved with a well connected enterprise. In this blog entry, I would like to highlight aspects that need to be considered to build an end-to-end integration solution. (Note: This blog entry will not get into the details on how to implement each of these areas, which would result in me writing a book J.)

1. Connectivity – Avoiding point-to-point connectivity and ensuring that you have loosely coupled systems is key to ensuring that your EAI architecture is flexible and can scale.Use an ESB as the heart of you EAI architecture and ensure that your ESB has support for all major protocols (HTTP, SOAP, JMS, JCA, JDBC, FTP, etc.) and comes with adapters for common enterprise applications like SAP, Oracle, Siebel, PeopleSoft, etc.
   
   
2. Patterns - Build a pattern based integration solution. The following is an excellent paper that outlines some of the common patterns used in the integration space:http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ws-enterpriseconnectivitypatterns/index.html
   
   
3. Data - Data is of great significance when it comes to integration. Different systems have different data formats and there are common items to consider that can help you deal with these differences:




• Define canonical data formats and ensure that you have mapping from application specific formats to canonical formats. Understand the various data formats that exist in your enterprise today and evaluate what it will take to map and manage complex data formats.


• EDI data is common in many enterprises and will require special handling.


• Define a strategy for handling reference data, how lookups can be done against this data and how reference data can be maintained.


• Define rules around both syntactic and semantic validation of messages. Do not over do validation as you will pay a price when it comes to performance. Be judicious in what you want to validate and where.




4. Monitoring - An aspect that is often overlooked when building integration solutions is monitoring. Ensure that you have the right framework(s) in place to monitor your integrations and service components. You will need the ability to monitor every protocol the ESB supports. You also need to couple monitoring with notifications and error handling. You will need a strategy for auditing your messages. Again, as in the case with validations, be judicious in what you want to audit and when. There is a price to pay. Define a centralized service for auditing requirements and ensure that all integration components make use of this service.
   


5. Security - Security is the most critical part of implementing an integration solution. I have to say that most customers realize that security is important but sometimes, because of a lack of expertise in how to correctly secure their solution, the end result is a solution that is way more costly and in fact less secure than desired. Some considerations are:




• Define your security requirements – authentication, authorization, encryption, non-repudiation, etc.


• Decide what aspect(s) can be supported by transport level security and when you need message level security.


• Decide where hardware components can be used to better implement security than software components.


• Use open standard protocols so that you can easily integrate with different systems – both internal and external.





6. Service Oriented Integration – With the adoption of SOA, one of the key architectural models used for integration is to connect to service interfaces that are exposed by various systems. With this architecture, it is also now possible to choose what service / functionality you use dynamically at runtime. Another aspect that SOA has brought to the integration world is a policy-driven approach to integration – that is, data that is being passed to a system or between systems is used to check what policy needs to be applied at runtime to determine what service to use and what actions to perform (auditing, validation, encryption etc.). Integration coupled with SOA introduces another component into the EAI architecture – a registry and repository where services and policies are cataloged and can be used to bring about dynamic, policy-driven behavior.

This confluence of pattern based connectivity, data handling, monitoring, security, and service-oriented integration can provide you with a well-connected enterprise that can respond quickly to changing business needs.

Rajiv Ramachandran first joined Prolifics as a Consultant, and is currently the Practice Director for Enterprise Integration. He has 11 years experience in the IT field — 3 of those years at IBM working as a developer at its Object Technology Group and its Component Technology Competency Center in Bangalore. He was then an Architect implementing IBM WebSphere Solutions at Fireman’s Fund Insurance. Currently, he specializes in SOA and IBM’s SOA-related technologies and products. An author at the IBM developerWorks community, Rajiv has been a presenter at IMPACT and IBM's WebSphere Services Technical Conference.