5 Tips For Ensuring Enterprise IT Reliability

March 2010

Organizations are looking to increase reliability and

better manage IT systems. Following are 5 tips to help

improve the value of IT systems for ongoing

performance management, service level agreements

(SLAs), capacity planning, and optimizing IT services

to business needs.

1. Connect the Dots

Transactions are the common denominator of all IT elements to build the foundation by:

• Linking isolated IT silos• Establishing a horizontal foundation that connects:

• End-users • Networks• Proxy Servers • Web Servers• Load Balancers

• Application Servers

• Message Brokers• Databases• Mainframes

Today’s siloed

approach

2. Monitor IT Performance by Transactions

• It’s important not only to

measure the end user

experience, but also understand

how it’s affected by response

times and workloads across

multiple tiers

• Focusing on tracking transactions

across all hops allows:

• Quick isolation and root cause

analysis

• Proactive tuning

• Future planning

Dynamic detection and topology mapping

3. Audit All Transactions

• Auditing initiatives takes months and still may result in

disparities between back-end databases and end-users

• Business Transaction Management provides complete audits by:

• Tracing all transactions 24x7

• Ensuring 100% accuracy with the end-user

• Collecting granular information to provide a business view of the

data center

• Knowing which activity was yielded by each end-user request, down

to the granular level of SQL statements or any other call

4. Monitor Application Activity Level

• Use a reliability platform dashboard to:• Watch sensitive areas

• Detect abnormal use

• Find thieves/malicious users before harm is done to the infrastructure

• Detail what damage was done and how to fix it

An example of a system-wide workload demonstrates where issues occur

5. Predict Capacity Need Changes

By tracking individual transactions, IT managers gain predictive

abilities. Answer capacity questions such as:

• Does the application need to be tuned?

• Does more hardware need to be provisioned?

Correlated transactional data for IT reliability

5 Tips for Ensuring IT Reliability

IT reliability is critical to business success as downtime and poor performance of applications directly impact revenue, brand, customer loyalty and retention. Business transaction management is emerging as one approach to help ensure IT reliability.

For a detailed white paper on this topic or to learn more about business transaction management, visit: www.correlsense.com