Once again, Apple has shown its product and marketing prowess with the launch of the iPhone 6 models and the Apple Watch. Cool as they may be, ApplePay could be the most significant illustration of how Apple necessitates the PADS Framework.
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The PADS (Performance Analytics and Decision Support) Framework, links advanced performance management and big data analytics technologies. It enables enterprises and service providers to gain deep and real-time visibility into, and predictive intelligence from, increasingly complex IT systems across the entire application delivery chain.
PADS is a higher-level strategic framework that establishes best practices for assuring user experience, reducing risk and improving operational decision making in a more efficient, secure and timely fashion.
Without doubt, the new iPhones will stimulate both existing customer upgrades and attract new ones. In turn, the larger screens will drive more data services. This sustains demand for performance analytics and operational intelligence. While Apple Watch may take some time to find its market, it too is an incremental traffic generator.
Longer term, ApplePay has significant potential ramifications for PADS vendors. If Apple succeeds in changing consumer purchasing habits – again – the new traffic ApplePay will generate plays into PADS capabilities for cybersecurity and big data analytics. Authentication, verification and user experience will be paramount to service providers, merchants that accept the service (retail and restaurants are just a start) as well as to the credit card companies and banks that support the system.
A More Strategic Approach To Operational Intelligence
Uptime is the benchmark of an IT team’s success or failure. CIOs and business users consistently rank high-availability of applications and services as their top priority. Lost efficiency and productivity from poor transaction performance can be measured at up to $1 million per hour. Collateral fallout includes dissatisfied customers, disgruntled end-users, fines for non-compliance, and reputation damage.
New agile processes and cross-platform development for cloud and mobility challenge IT’s ability to keep networks and apps running smoothly. Increased systems complexity begets performance degradation. As more business processes rely on shared services and compute resources that are controlled outside the enterprise, the less visibility IT and business owners have into the application delivery chain.
Enterprises must stop monitoring and managing performance and user experience from traditional technology domains such as servers, network, application, operating system or security. Legacy performance monitoring solutions are overwhelmed by the scale of data required to comprehensively manage application performance. Data gathered from different tools is not normalized or time synchronized, resulting in too many false positives that end up being ignored. Analysis and rapid problem resolution is impossible.
To better understand the properties of system components and their place in the overall application delivery chain requires a higher-level assessment of the relationships to each other as well as to the wider system and environment. Enter the PADS Framework.
The PADS framework connects unified next-generation performance management and operational intelligence technologies into holistic, integrated platforms that consolidate multiple previously discrete functions. These platforms work in concert, as performance data analytics provides physical and logical knowledge of the computing environment to allow for more powerful and granular data queries, discovery and manipulation. Modeling and mapping capabilities enable faster drill-down and problem resolution.
The twin missions of the Framework are to:
- allow IT to be more proactive in anticipating, identifying and resolving performance problems by focusing on user/customer experience; and,
- enable IT to become a strategic provider and orchestrator of internally and externally sourced services to business units that can leverage operational intelligence.
The Better You Can Measure It, the Better You Can Manage It
The most relevant metric for any IT organization is not about infrastructure utilization. Instead, it is at what point of utilization the user experience begins to degrade. IT can then feed this information about the application delivery chain and user experience upstream into an operational intelligence (OI) platform. An OI platform collects, indexes, correlates and analyzes log and other forms of machine data at massive scale to help IT organizations and line of business users gain real-time insights from disparate data types and sources.
Consolidating this data to make it readily searchable can reveal previously undetected patterns or unique events. The value of this information allows IT to quickly identify and troubleshoot systems, investigate security incidents and demonstrate compliance efficiently and cost effectively. When combined with historical data in traditional BI systems and data warehouses and newer data discovery tools that provide easy-to-use visualization techniques, the broader intelligence IT and business users gain drive better operational decision making.
While no one solution can provide everything, deploying too many solutions only increases complexity, cost and frustration. High-performing enterprises use no more than three solutions, with forward-thinking IT teams linking performance management and operational intelligence platforms.
Is the PADS Framework for you? Download the free report here.
