Why Application Visibility Matters So Much
It’s very difficult to deliver a commitment level of an application service without a Service Level Agreement (SLA). And it’s impossible to manage an application’s SLA without first gaining visibility into it. Solutions for monitoring application performance and SLA has long been considered a costly and complex task which required inserting hardware probes and/or integrating software agents into every application server.
When deploying applications and associated infrastructure, you have to pay particular attention to when things are slowing, so it’s critical to proactively monitor performance, including service alerts when an application is not meeting its SLA requirements.
There are many reasons for an SLA breach, from unavailable services due to device outage or configuration issues, to problems of access from a particular geography, a specific device type, a particular data center, or something in between. Other reasons may be security attacks that may be affecting application performance due to resource availability. It’s important to proactively know these issues before they become a business disruption.
Segregation & Compliance
In a multi-tenant environment, if the environments are not segregated, tenants may start competing for shared resources during peak utilization. In an environment where tenants share the resources, a potential spike in resource consumption or a wrong configuration change of a single tenant may impact all other tenants – severely impacting an application’s SLA and availability.
Scalability and Automation
To keep costs down, you’d provision your application environment for average resource consumption and may utilize on-demand provisioning of additional application resources for peak demand as needed. Automation enables quick provisioning of application resources to enable scale. The same resources may be removed when not needed. However, effective provisioning requires a clear visibility and continuous monitoring of quality of experience.
Security
Add to this the need for correlated visibility and forensics across all of application components so you can get alerted in the event of a breach and can take remedial action in case of an incident. You’ll need to look at each point of the security in the network – from user identity for administration and access, password policies, auditing and logging across the board, to securing the communication protocol, assessing vulnerability in your applications, detecting and preventing malicious attacks, securing data when at rest or in transit and addressing any area of possible information leakage due to social engineering.
Solution:
A next generation ADC can provide a very cost effective and secure consolidation environment for providing availability, security, and business continuity across a multi-tenant hybrid application environment. With capabilities such as local and global server load balancing, web application security and acceleration, and the continuous monitoring of quality of experience, ADCs provide proactive visibility to measure and deliver on an application SLA and improve business reputation.
