This weekend, the New York Giants and New England Patriots square off in Super Bowl 46 in Indianapolis to determine NFL supremacy for 2011. If you’ve caught any of the many press conferences leading up to the game, you probably have heard Patriots’ head coach Bill Belichick preaching that his team needs to be good in all three phases of the game – offense, defense, and special teams – in order to have a chance to win football’s ultimate prize, the Lombardi Trophy.
Belichick and his coaching brethren know that each unit of the team must perform at a top level in order to win in the highly-competitive NFL. The defense can keep points off the board, special teams can help with the “field position” battle and if the offense scores early, it can pressure the opposing team into doing things to which they are not accustomed.
The same all-phases-of-the-game mentality applies to enterprise IT as well, as the more visibility one has into both application and infrastructure performance, the better the outcome in terms of uptime and user satisfaction. A NetForecast benchmarking survey from last summer shows that this all-phase-of-the-game approach works:
We can unequivocally say that those with a “stereoscopic” view of infrastructure as well as application performance achieve dramatically better results than those with a “monoscopic” view of just one or the other.
The NetForecast survey shows that the percentage of the time IT discovers performance problems, number of critical application incidents per month, and typical time needed to resolve a critical application incident (mean time to repair or MTTR) all improve dramatically when IT has a view into both application and infrastructure performance.
We here in the Service Assurance group believe wholeheartedly in being good in all-phases-of-the-game by having complete visibility into application and infrastructure (be it physical, virtual or cloud) performance. A quick look at our lineup shows how we help customers get the most out of their technology investments.
Application Performance Management (APM) – Provides deeper insight into how both the application and underlying technology supporting said application is performing, making it easier to diagnose if a potential problem is occurring in piece of code, the database or a hardware component.
Infrastructure Management – Helps you deliver high performing IT services over your physical, virtual and cloud-based infrastructure through discovery, fault isolation, root-cause analysis, configuration and change management, performance management, traffic analysis and predictive capacity planning.
Service Operations Insight (SOI) – Ties all of your performance monitoring – including from third-party applications – into a single view. In a football analogy, I’d call this the coaching staff sitting high in the booth during the game with an eye on the entire field of play. They see everything happening. SOI does too.
As the NetForecast survey outlined, having a greater visibility into application and infrastructure health can help alleviate problems before they become major headaches and fix things quicker if they do in fact break. It’s all about being good in all phases of the game, and Service Assurance can play a vital role.
As for this weekend’s big game: Go Patriots!
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