The key to mastering any recipe is finding the perfect balance of ingredients. English poet William Cowper wrote in his 1785 compilation, The Task, “Variety’s the spice of life, that gives it all its flavor.” It’s a poetic sentiment that needs to come with a caveat: too much spice overwhelms the dish. Continue reading
Middleware-centric APM
The Nastel Blog on APM
Tag Archives: Middleware Messaging
Creating a Signature Dish: A Recipe for Success
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Monitoring the Middleware-centric Enterprise
What happens when an unexpected weather event suddenly drives demand for your product causing a shudder throughout your supply chain? What about a system bottleneck that threatens to disrupt customer service during a peak period? Business success and continuity depends on immediately knowing about situations like these. If your business-critical applications run in a composite application environment spanning web and legacy tiers, events like the ones above require intensive situational management. With growing external regulatory pressures such as Dodd-Frank and ever increasing internal requirements for compliance, this level of management is a necessity for survival. Continue reading
Making big data into small data
It isn’t every day you get to write about Immanuel Kant and Big Data in the same blog post but last week Gartner Analyst Will Cappelli did just that. As you’ll see in his post, “AI and IAM: Will Two-Tier Analytics Become the Norm for IAM?” context is the key. Cappelli addresses Kant’s conclusion that human reasoning is a two-tier process that first involves what is—the contextual lens in which we view our existence—and how the pieces all relate to each other. From this standpoint, we reason and make decisions. Continue reading
The best view, is a unified view
Many enterprises utilize middleware as the “glue” linking their application infrastructure together. This application fabric is usually comprised of bespoke and commercial applications, some of which are sourced within the company and others obtained through acquisition. For these enterprises, middleware lets it all work together. Unfortunately, the middleware solutions are often used on a department or division basis with a box of overlapping tools to monitor and manage them. As IT is still for the most part organized in silos (see Silos of Shame), this can be costly at best providing a technology-specific view of status and with little overall visibility of the application, itself.
Don’t forget the CIO…he is also a customer
In 1909, Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridge’s department store, coined the phrase “The customer is always right,” and it has become the mantra of countless businesses since. At the time, Gordon could have been considered a customer service revolutionary in the world of modern business. Fast forward a century and there is little doubt that the customer is still king. Customer service has even been cited by some as the only true business metric for growth. Happy customers are profitable customers.
Sorting Through the APM Clutter
Alexander Podelko, a performance expert working with Oracle, recently wrote a blog post in which he takes a look at the current state of the APM market and what he thinks needs to change in order for companies to get the most out of their solutions.
Bursting Big Data’s Bubble: Playing the Pattern
Nastel recently joined a conversation on Infoworld.com around what writer Dan Tynan described as “IT’s worst addictions.” From our perspective, data is one of these addictions, and by far one of the biggest pain points that the IT industry is forced to deal with today. ‘Big Data’ is the hot potato of 2012—everyone is talking about it and the term is increasingly tossed around within operational circles in organizations. Everyone wants to know “What are we doing about Big Data?” or “What’s our Big Data strategy?” If you’re a vendor and you don’t have a solution to manage it, analyze it, optimize it, minimize it, or otherwise be involved in Big Data, you’ve missed the bandwagon.
How much of it is hype? Continue reading
Architectural Insights for Deploying WMQ
WebSphere MQ 7 is an impressive piece of software. Not only is it easy to install on most platforms, but it is also easy to setup with default options. However, if we look at the options offered to us while setting up WebSphere MQ and Queue Managers, we will see a lot of flexibility that can help take advantage of a user’s environment. Two options that I would like go over specifically are:
Nastel receives more recognition as a leader in APM
It’s not often that we like to give ourselves a pat on the back, but when we feel it’s deserving, well then we do it. Therefore, Nastel was named a Bronze-level winner in the Best in Biz awards in the Enterprise Product of the Year category. The winners were announced this week.
M&A – Merging Your Acquired IT Management Tools
Good news: Your company has just gone through a merger. But surprise, surprise: you have also acquired a whole new set of management tools, along with a whole new set of applications. Also included, at no charge is a fresh set of application problems. Oh boy.