Automation of application and network management has been a hot topic lately. In her article Next-generation mgmt. tools indicate more automation to come analyst Julie Craig from EMA heralds the beginning of a trend toward automation. Though her focus is on some new BSM products, the scope of the movement is much larger. As a matter of fact, a truly automated performance management system has to first address the challenge of an increasingly virtualized and interconnected infrastructure to deliver application services that goes beyond silos like servers, storage, network devices, and middleware. We call this resource infrastructure application fabric. Only with granular, enterprise-wide real-time visibility into this fabric or the connections between different domains of this fabric from a network vantage point, can we begin to apply progressive analytics technology to effectively reduce the dependence on manual efforts to detect anomaly and diagnose performance problems.
It is still a long way to go to reach the nirvana of autonomic management. However, if we can gain insight into this application fabric and provide early warning of impending performance problems by automating the detection and diagnosing the root-cause of network and application flow anomalies, we can immediately help reduce MTTR (Mean-Time-to-Repair).
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