Turbonomic

How many times do you get a call from the help desk about some application being slow or down? More than you would like, I’m sure. The more troubling part is that they call about some business application (or many of them) that are affected and now you have to chase down what the underlying root cause of the issue is.

How do you know if it’s the code, or a resource issue? How do you even find out what the dependencies are inside the application to everything it is using in your cloud or virtualization environment?

Let’s take a look at how you can shorten the MTTR greatly and have a complete, dynamic view of the whole application and resource supply chain with no APM or special skills required!

Setting up a Service in IBM Turbonomic with ATD

You probably have a shared SQL server or some shared service somewhere in your environment, so let’s use that as our simple use-case to start. Open up your Settings and click the Application Topology icon to get started.

We want to create a simple Application Topology Definition (ATD) for our service which is going to be used to build other multi-tier applications. The reason is that in a few simple clicks you are dynamically associating the service to the apps that it supports, and this makes an automatic and dynamic mapping of all the underlying resources to the top-level business application.

Simply choose with your selection criteria as either a dynamic or manual query to select the server(s) that make up your service. For our example we are using a small SQL cluster and putting the virtual machines into our service definition.

Now we will have a service defined within IBM Turbonomic that has both a visualization of the full resource dependency map, but also the overall health of the application at the top will be based on the cumulative health and risk from the resources below.

This is especially helpful as you click through the layers and you can see the relationships, utilization metrics, and from this image you can see that the storage contention has an impact on the business application because the SQL cluster service is depending on it and can be impacted which results in latency to the top-level application.

Let’s go one step further. Recall that this is a database service that is providing shared access to databases for many applications. By using the ATD to define our other business apps in just a couple of clicks, you will see all the dependent apps which rely on this SQL (or any) service layer!

That is all done using built-in capabilities and no 3^rd party APM required to define your apps. Even when you have APM platforms in place, you probably don’t have complete coverage for all of your applications due to the complexity and cost of doing so.

With just a couple of clicks for each manual application definition, you have an incredibly valuable, dynamic visualization of the risk to your application based on resource utilization, health, and all of the adjacent resources that can affect each application.

Actions Speak Louder than Words (or Visualization)

Seeing these relationships and maps is a fantastic capability to help your team. This is designed to create a first-pane-of-glass for you to go to look at the health, performance, and efficiency of any part of your IT environment. By the way, did we mention this works on any infrastructure on-premises, on the cloud, or in containers?

IBM Turbonomic APEX is completely flexible to span any part of your environment. It also tags your resources automatically in the IBM Turbonomic Data Cloud platform for a zero-touch experience as you embrace time-series data with high granularity visualizations.

Actions definitely speak louder because the health of your applications will be shown to you as well as immediate access to the resourcing actions that can be taken by you (or for you in automation) which will assure the health, resiliency, and efficiency of your applications regardless of the underlying platform.

There will be lots of updates coming in the first part of the year as we explore more use-cases and you can learn more about unlocking the APEX capabilities that you have out-of-the-box with your IBM Turbonomic platform.