Evaluating Innovative I&O Solutions: Converged Application Performance Management

IT complexity is the major underlying theme of the years to come for infrastructure and operations. I&O teams have attempted to abstract this complexity with virtualization, cloud computing and SaaS, and virtual data centers. These solutions all attempt to mask the inherent complexity of managing compute, network, and storage platforms. But this only effectively abstracts the administrative aspect of infrastructure complexity and fails to reduce complexity where it matters most: the business service. Enter application performance management (APM), which provides the decision-making trigger that complements the administrative abstraction. This document will highlight innovative solutions in the APM market that can help I&O teams increase productivity. Specifically, we spotlight how complex event processing (CEP) adapted to APM takes I&O another step forward in reaching the Holy Grail of controlling and automating the management of application performance. We highlight Nastel as a particularly innovative implementation of CEP in an APM solution. Nastel is one of the best tools so far to build a closed-loop automation solution for application management.