IT lifecycle management

		Ensure system performance An IT lifecycle imperative Service level agreements concern themselves with a business application’s ability to deliver information and insight in as timely and reliable manner as possible. What can an IT organization do to be proactive – to build systems correctly, from the ground up, and then to enable the early detection, diagnosis and removal of the SLA violations that almost inevitably occur in production?

For most companies, client-server applications are in a nearly continuous cycle of reinvention - integrating transactions from legacy applications, reworking navigation and usability to meet business and competitive needs, acquiring new and innovative technology or business process upgrades. Such evolution greatly complicates traditional performance optimization approaches, requiring a more interactive and automated approach to eliminate bottlenecks before they reach the production environment. Availability, scalability and performance problems tend to require long discovery, diagnosis and removal cycles as their cause can be very difficult to uncover. The challenge is for development to reduce normal cycle times in order to protect and optimize the performance and function of critical applications. Otherwise, the Operations team is left with an underperforming application that can't meet its service level commitments and for which their only recourse is to throw on additional hardware.

The Ensure System Performance imperative demands that organizations continuously ensure system performance in order to isolate and correct underlying performance problems as early in the lifecycle as possible.

Responsibilities include:

• Designing for performance by capturing performance requirements early in the development cycle.
• Identifying, in real-time, poor performance trends, problems and resource bottlenecks during the development phase.
• Automating scalability validation and testing prior to deployment.
• Integrating performance analytics with underlying code for rapid resolution of problems that slip into the production environment.

The IBM IT lifecycle solution for the Ensure System Performance imperative fulfills these requirements.

With IBM's assistance:

• Architects and business analysts can design performance into an application from the start of the IT Lifecycle - reducing rework costs.
• Developers can identify problems when they are cheap and simple to fix - long before they lead to critical and expensive outages.
• Testers can identify performance concerns in the test lab or staging environments and provide detailed information that speeds diagnosis and repair.
• Developers can access performance data directly from the live production systems without installing high-overhead, low-reliability debugging tools on mission-critical production machines.
• Development managers and LOB executives can be assured of rapid problem resolution by leveraging and integrating development and operations management processes.