This-specific-end-to-that-specific-end network performance management.

EMA analyst Dennis Drogseth had a column in Network World yesterday talking about end-to-end application management. In it, he had this to say:

You might believe, and with some real justification, that the term “end to end” is only used by vendors who custom-fit the definition to the scope of their particular product.

Does “end-to-end” application management, for instance, include the mainframe? You bet it does if you’re a vendor that manages the mainframe environment! Does it include capturing the end user experience at the end station, desktop, or mobile device? Once again, the answer is a definitive “yes” if you’re a vendor that has strong QoE (Quality of Experience) roots. Or how about insights into the code and design of the application itself? If you’re one of the few vendors that does this, you’re proud of it and wouldn’t have it any other way!

And this concerned me because, if you do a google search for: [site:networkperformancedaily.com “end-to-end”], you get 122 results. The phrase, “end-to-end” appears in a little more than 1 in 5 posts we’ve made to this blog.

So, what do we mean by “end-to-end?”  We’re usually using the phrase in connection with network response times and the end-user experience at the end station; NetQoS is a “vendor that has strong QoE roots.”

Now, we do have some insight into the code and design of the application.  But that isn’t the focus of our tools; the focus is to tell you whether the problem is in the network, server, or application, and if it’s in the application, give you a good idea of where to start your investigation.  (For example, an application that is slow due to unnecessary round-trip transactions behaves differently from an application that is slow due to a memory leak on the server where it is being run.) 

Drogseth is right when he says that no one vendor is optimized to do it all.  In the future, there could be, but then you run into the quality vs. quantity problem.  Is it better to do it all adequately or to do a few things extremely well?

EMA defined five major technology spheres, and last June, they polled more than 400 respondents to find out which of them they believed “most critical to end-to-end application management in 2008.”  The answer was “Network Application Management,” focusing on application flows and end-to-end (as we define it) transaction capabilities. 

For more information on this, I recommend you read the original article up at Network World.  Additionally, Drogseth promises to follow-up in his next two columns.