I’m assuming if you’re reading this you know what IBM WebSphere Application Server (WAS) is. If not, or if you want to hear more about the latest capabilities from the 24 June Version 9 release, check out this announcement.

Likewise, this also won’t be an overview on IBM Application Performance Management, but there’s plenty of great info here on that.  The focus of this blog post is on the combination of WAS and IBM APM and how it helps to accelerate the delivery of applications and services.

The answer to digital disruption

This is critical because if your business isn’t already undergoing a digital disruption, it will soon, because it’s easier than ever for companies to create new models and interact with their customers through apps and services.  That interaction integrates into a feedback loop for continuous improvement, creating a strong connection with customers as they receive a quick response to their requests.  This means change is the new normal. Where IT departments previously tried to create stability, especially in production environments, that is no longer a recipe for success.  Businesses have to adapt to keep up.

To allow the continuous delivery necessary to provide innovative services, organizations must find ways to successfully move applications from development to production quickly without rollbacks or quality issues like poor performance.

Making access faster and more flexible

One way businesses are addressing this is by taking advantage of the deployment and portability speed offered by public, private and hybrid cloud environments.  This can be difficult when dealing with inflexible application environments such as legacy applications or runtimes designed specifically for a certain platform.  However, WAS provides a robust application platform that is extremely flexible, with the ability to run in any of the environments shown in the graphic below, and can even shift workloads between them without having to redesign the entire application:

Of course, these applications and services must provide the performance and quality necessary to deliver a good customer experience despite continual change.  That’s where APM can be extremely helpful by identifying availability issues and performance bottlenecks throughout the application lifecycle, especially during the development and test phases, to ensure optimal performance when deployed.

I’ve talked about some of the best practices in managing WAS applications with IBM APM in a previous blog post.  In addition, it provides the same flexibility as WAS, so you can manage your WAS applications wherever they reside.  The IBM PureApplication System (IPAS) includes entitlement to IBM APM to monitor the health of IPAS itself and the WAS workloads that run on it.  It’s also tightly integrated, providing:

• Launch in context to the monitoring dashboards
• Integrated security management, including single sign-on
• Auto-scaling and load-balancing based on number of agents
• Integrated monitoring events are viewable in the PureApplication Systems Console along with other IPAS events

WAS/Liberty workloads running on Bluemix can be managed with IBM Monitoring & Analytics for Bluemix service. Details can be found here.

By providing the flexibility to manage your WAS applications wherever they reside, as well as providing the full end-to-end management necessary to understand the overall health of your applications and quickly resolve issues without blind spots, IBM APM can help to accelerate innovation in hybrid environments. Performance can be ensured and applications can be available amidst continual change.

Interested in learning more about IBM APM and WAS? Read the whitepaper.

This article was authored by Todd Kindsfather.