January 31, 2005 (Computerworld) --
It's midnight on the campus of Wayne State University in Detroit, but many students and faculty members are still at work, entering test grades, uploading notes, registering for classes or filling out financial aid forms using the university's online systems. John Camp, Wayne State's CIO, says it's critical that students and staffers be able to complete their tasks unhindered by sluggish Web servers or database bottlenecks. Access to university systems is so important, in fact, that Wayne State recently installed the Vantage application monitoring tool from Compuware Corp. to sound an alert should any systems falter. "It's strategically important that we make it convenient for people to register for classes, check grades and interact with professors," explains Camp, noting that students, like everyone else, expect round-the-clock access to online services such as e-mail and financial accounts, as well as their class notes and other university-provided systems. "The drive toward self-service applications over the Internet has changed everything," Camp says. "People have very high expectations of availability now." These days, there's virtually no business process that isn't automated by software, be it payroll, purchasing, inventory management, customer service or any of thousands of other daily activities. The increasing reliance on computers to conduct critical business transactions has motivated more organizations to invest in application monitoring and management technology, in addition to the traditional network- and hardware-monitoring products they already own. Another factor is the increasing complexity of distributed applications. This interdependence of applications makes it more difficult to identify problems and often leads to finger-pointing between IT departments and outside vendors. Henry Yiin, manager of network administration at CDC IXIS North America Inc., the U.S. arm of international banking firm CDC IXIS, says most people blame the network when something goes wrong. So he relies on Network Physics Inc.'s NP-1000 appliance to help pinpoint the actual source of failure in application performance.
"Two or three times, we've had a major server outage, and [the NP-1000] provided evidence that it wasn't the network's problem," says Yiin. The NP-1000 monitors trading applications and the company's Exchange e-mail server. A separate product, BMC Software Inc.'s Patrol, keeps an eye on the database. Gartner Inc. analyst Laurie Wurster estimates that worldwide sales of application monitoring and management tools currently total $484 million annually. She has identified at least 58 vendors of application monitoring and/or management products. Wurster's research shows that sales of the tools grew by 30.7% from 2002 to 2003. "We're starting to see spending on things that will increase productivity, decrease downtime and make an organization run better for less," she says. One way such tools improve productivity is by enabling less-technical employees
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