Bridging the Water Between Network and Application Management

Clouds, IPTV and smartphones. You can’t miss the buzz around high tech’s latest darlings. And those trends have profound implications for management systems.

Now in my previous blogs I’ve focused mostly on the concerns of traditional network and element management. But as the old Bob Dylan songs says, “the times they are a’ changin.’"  In fact, it no longer makes sense to talk about NMS or EMS as standalone entities anymore because systems act differently  today and usually dovetail with things like systems management, application management and cloud monitoring.

To begin, let’s talk about the basic difference between telecom network management and application management.

A few decades ago, the telecom NMS/EMS world managed mostly network elements, such as routing and switching hardware. Then, with the arrival of the advanced intelligent network applications, such as voice messaging and call forwarding, telecoms began to enter into the systems space with servers, databases and applications running these intelligent systems.

A good example here is Broadsoft, a leading vendor in Voice over IP (VoIP) application platforms, where network devices, servers and applications are all controlled in a single management system. Another example is the Ericsson Messaging application platform for text, multimedia, voice and chat, that exposes health and performance data to a management console. Both examples provide carriers additional services and the ability to manage that infrastructure.

At Zoho, we’ve seen the merger of device management and application coming for a long time. Without visibility into the entire infrastructure and the relationship between device and application, it’s like driving with a hand over one eye.

When I say “system management," I mean monitoring lower-level components such as Server CPU, memory and disk utilization or database metrics such as response times, table spaces and buffer and cache sizes. Now, in addition to watching the underlying server, one can look at metrics within the application itself. And in this case, the “application" is not the gaming or mapping application you use on the iPhone, but rather all the backend programming and infrastructure that run that iPhone app on the telecom devices, servers, databases, and J2EE/.Net servers.

Hundreds of applications out there now require a strong crossover between NMS/EMS and application/system management. You see them in engineering or financial applications, ERP systems, VoIP platforms and especially next-generation stuff like smartphone video transport.

While the applications landscape is highly diverse, each application generally requires the same core capabilities: availability and performance monitoring, reporting, configuration and provisioning. And it’s also quite handy to have one dashboard supporting all the moving parts you need to manage.

Monitoring the Customer Experience

Back in the 1990s, the biggest complaint about management systems was they failed to give you a fine-grained view. Sure, you could detect when servers were down and network were congested, but you just couldn’t easily relate that to what each customer was experiencing.

And with the arrival of smartphones, many of the applications are migrating to the network and need to operate in harsh, bandwidth-constrained radio networks. Execution performance is paramount.

Customer experience monitoring is where integrated management really pays for itself. Performance spikes and degradations are inevitable, but with good network and application management, you can diagnose problems and pinpoint where the issue is faster. Plus QoS metrics and traffic patterns over time enable optimal capacity planning thus stopping future gradation.

With good monitoring, you can measure application performance in seconds or even milliseconds. How long does it take to perform synthetic Web transactions?  If it takes several seconds, the user experience is not good and you may be losing business.

The trend toward more cloud-based applications is certainly putting greater focus on management systems. The reluctance to move to the cloud comes from the feeling of lost control. Our management technologies exist today to give users access and visibility to fault and performance data. Regardless of where the data resides in the cloud (private, public like Amazon EC2 or hybrid cloud), it needs to managed and controlled. If the service provider is offering managed services or cloud services, it’s invaluable to see the infrastructure health and traffic performance with applications like VMWare or Sharepoint along with your networking gear in a single console. When that happens, the finger-pointing goes away. Thousands of companies and employees rely on these systems. If they go down, peoples’ productivity suffers. In your own experience, think about the times you grit your teeth and got frustrated when systems fail to perform a routine task. All this can be prevented with proactive management applications.

Supporting Technology and Management System Diversity

What makes for good management solutions in today’s highly interconnected world?  More than ever, it’s a confluence of skills: knowledge about networks, applications, databases and servers. And if you offer management systems, you need to support – or connect to – a diverse array of environments because folks come from different backgrounds – Linux, Windows, Solaris or AS400 on the platform; Oracle, DB2, MySQL or MSSQL in databases; and Tomcat, JBoss, WebSphere and WebLogic. And in many cases, it’s a mixed technology shop. In short, in the IT- and communications-rich world we live in, there’s no shortage of management challenges to solve.

Stayed tuned, by the way. We’ve got more to say about integrated network management and application management in our next blog on cloud computing. 

Eric Wegner is a 20-year veteran of the industry and has 10 years of experience with ZOHO Corp . (formerly AdventNet) working on large and complex network management infrastructures for network equipment manufacturers, service providers and military contractors. Eric joined the company as the first sales person and is now business development manager leading the WebNMS division in North America.