Roger Howorth
Roger Howorth is a journalist and IT contractor working for various clients operating in financial services.
Monday 22 September 2008, 6:47 PM
Automatic fault finding
All too often a problem is easy to fix once it has been correctly diagnosed. The trouble is, it can sometimes take a disproportionate amount of time to identify the problem.
A fault with a NAS device recently highlighted this for me in no uncertain terms. Users started complaining that software that used to work quickly was now taking too long. I checked cables and server logs, but initially there was no sign of any problem. A few days later, the server logs began to fill up with reports indicating a faulty disk drive.
Perhaps it should be no surprise then that several people attending the VMworld show in Las Vegas last week said the automated diagnostic features of VMware’s AppSpeed console were the star of the show.
AppSpeed was acquired by VMware when it bought B-Hive earlier this year, and the technology is soon to be integrated into VirtualCenter. The end result will be a single suite that can monitor an application to learn about how it works. In a demonstration at VMworld we saw AppSpeed map out an application simply by watching network transactions such as requests and responses from the application’s web based user interface, and queries to its backend databases. In only a few minutes AppSpeed made a map of the servers and the connections between them, and graphed the average time taken for each transaction.
As one attendee put it, this was really exciting because it would provide a quick way to find out where the problem was if users started complaining. Without this kind of technology, it could take hours to get enough insight into the application to enable further debugging. Also, the various departments responsible for the different elements in an application have a habit of denying responsibility and pointing the finger elsewhere.
The kind of diagnostic information produced by AppSpeed makes this kind of behaviour easier to challenge, because administrators would have real data to back them up. For example, they could say, “Look, queries to your database are taking five seconds, while the rest of the transactions total 200 milliseconds.”
The irony here is that AppSpeed is not being sold as a diagnostic tool. Rather, VMware thinks people will buy it to automate the management of their application services. For example, if an application is running slowly, AppSpeed could automatically allocate more resources. In some circumstances that could be the right response. In others, the best long term solution might be a bit of software redesign.
A fault with a NAS device recently highlighted this for me in no uncertain terms. Users started complaining that software that used to work quickly was now taking too long. I checked cables and server logs, but initially there was no sign of any problem. A few days later, the server logs began to fill up with reports indicating a faulty disk drive.
Perhaps it should be no surprise then that several people attending the VMworld show in Las Vegas last week said the automated diagnostic features of VMware’s AppSpeed console were the star of the show.
AppSpeed was acquired by VMware when it bought B-Hive earlier this year, and the technology is soon to be integrated into VirtualCenter. The end result will be a single suite that can monitor an application to learn about how it works. In a demonstration at VMworld we saw AppSpeed map out an application simply by watching network transactions such as requests and responses from the application’s web based user interface, and queries to its backend databases. In only a few minutes AppSpeed made a map of the servers and the connections between them, and graphed the average time taken for each transaction.
As one attendee put it, this was really exciting because it would provide a quick way to find out where the problem was if users started complaining. Without this kind of technology, it could take hours to get enough insight into the application to enable further debugging. Also, the various departments responsible for the different elements in an application have a habit of denying responsibility and pointing the finger elsewhere.
The kind of diagnostic information produced by AppSpeed makes this kind of behaviour easier to challenge, because administrators would have real data to back them up. For example, they could say, “Look, queries to your database are taking five seconds, while the rest of the transactions total 200 milliseconds.”
The irony here is that AppSpeed is not being sold as a diagnostic tool. Rather, VMware thinks people will buy it to automate the management of their application services. For example, if an application is running slowly, AppSpeed could automatically allocate more resources. In some circumstances that could be the right response. In others, the best long term solution might be a bit of software redesign.
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