Empirical Does SLAs From End to End

ENT, March 4, 1998 by Jim Lefevre

As corporations begin to rely more and more on mission-critical applications in their day-to-day operations, keeping those applications up and running at optimal performance levels can be a difficult task for many IT departments. How does a corporation begin to evaluate its technology infrastructure and determine what infrastructure improvements will increase overall business productivity? Empirical Software Inc. (Richmond, Va.) offers a solution with its Empirical Suite.

"What users care about is their applications. The network is just something that makes the applications work. And there's more to maintaining application performance that simply technology, counseling or point products," says Edward Gaudet, Empirical Software vice president of marketing. "The thing that's unique about Empirical Suite is that it offers an end-to-end service-level agreement [SLA] solution."

By "end-to-end," Gaudet means that the Empirical Suite is a combination of professional consulting services and applications designed to enable corporations to plan, measure, predict and improve their application service levels. Currently, the Empirical Suite comprises three main components: Empirical Planner, a consulting service that provides a "recipe" for SLA management; Empirical Director, a software product that enables users to measure and predict SLAs; and Empirical Controller, a set of tools and applications that enable corporations to improve the performance and reliability of their applications, databases and networks.

"There's a lot of pressure on IT regarding application-related performance downtime. It's directly related to customers," says Gaudet, who says that monitoring and maintaining SLAs is the best way to relieve that pressure. "This is the way that the CIO or the IT guys can prove their value toward achieving business objectives."

Central to the Empirical Suite is Empirical Director 2.0, a software solution that enables IT staff to manage service levels for distributed enterprise applications using a thin-client architecture called n-tier that relies on Microsoft Corp.'s DCOM technology. According to Gaudet, Empirical Director not only enables administrators to control their SLAs through reporting, diagnosing and planning for SLA compliance issues, but also enables users to attack SLAs from a proactive stance. The product's Knowledge Engine examines applications and projects to determine if they will violate their SLAs in the future: "We've employed statistical neural networking technology that enables us to learn and understand application behavior, and train our engine to look at behaviour over time and predict SLA failures."

New to version 2.0 of Empirical Director is integration with the TME 10 management system from Tivoli Systems Inc. (Austin, Texas), which distributes SLA violations and recommendations into the Tivoli console; the ability to tune SQL statements in Oracle-based applications to increase application performance; the ability to send alarms through e-mail when SLA agreements are violated; a series of new engine rules for relational database applications; and enhanced diagnostic capabilities.

Empirical Director runs on Windows NT Web servers and gives administrators the ability to monitor and manage application SLAs from a Web browser.

The software supports various PeopleSoft Inc. (Pleasanton, Calif.) and Oracle Corp. applications out of the box and also manages SLAs for various custom applications and data warehousing applications based on Oracle, SQL Server or other relational databases.

"Someone's always asking about how the database are performing, and how often they've been down," says Brian Seal, database manager for Henrico County, Va., who uses the software to monitor service levels on five Oracle databases. "We do a little bit of everything here, and we run the gamut as far as financial applications go."

Henrico County runs and manages various home-grown applications for the area's government and school district. Applications range from those dealing with personnel, payroll and school records to emergency dispatch services. The county is attempting to migrate from proprietary mainframe infrastructure to a more open client/server architecture. Currently, the network infrastructure comprises a mainframe, five UNIX servers and 10 NT boxes.

Seal notes that in addition to monitoring database service levels, he uses Empirical Director for its SLA failure projection capabilities and is expecting to implememt several of the database tuning recommendations that the tool has provided. "Empirical Director is a cool tool for setting up databases and monitoring their performance levels," he concludes.