VMware vCenter AppSpeed

Overview:

VMware vCenter™ AppSpeed, part of of the VMware vCenter family of management products, enables VMware vSphere™ 4 administrators to ensure performance levels for virtualized multitier applications. AppSpeed offers powerful capabilities to discover and map all tiers of the infrastructure, identify application performance bottlenecks and enable root cause analysis. AppSpeed can also be used to model how applications would perform in virtualized environments, removing uncertainty about virtualizing business-critical applications.

Benefits

• Provides a real-time view of the actual end-user application performance, and monitors against specific service levels.
• Dramatically reduces troubleshooting time and finger pointing.
• Enables non-intrusive monitoring of virtual infrastructure.
• Integrates seamlessly with VMware vCenter Server and VMware vSphere client.
• Reduces barriers to virtualizing business-critical applications, enabling greater CapEx savings.

Ensure Performance Levels for Virtualized Multi-Tier Applications

Analyze the performance of applications in your environment and find ways to improve it. AppSpeed measures the latency experienced by the application end users and correlates that latency to the different tiers of the underlying physical and virtual infrastructure. Gain powerful capabilities to discover and map each tier of the infrastructure, identify application performance bottlenecks and enable root cause analysis. Model how applications would perform in virtualized environments and eliminate uncertainty about virtualizing business-critical applications. 

Get a Real-Time View of Actual End-User Application Performance

Discover the relationship between VMs and applications shortly after installation. Group VMs into logical units with dependency mapping and gain an end-to-end view of application performance. Out-of-the-box views and dashboards identify the worst performing applications, applications with declining performance and applications experiencing high network error rates.

• Identify trends and gain insight into root cause analysis through AppSpeed’s timeseries data.
• Create performance thresholds based on automatically calculated performance baselines.

Dramatically Reduce Troubleshooting Time and Finger Pointing

Determine whether network, infrastructure or application issues are at the root of performance concerns, then use a comprehensive set of tools for triaging and troubleshooting. View latency from the broad applications level all the way to the finest level of detail (transaction or database query). Break latency issues down to contributing components (infrastructure, network and application). Work with your networking and application owner counterparts to quickly resolve performance issues and eliminate endless triage, blame, and finger pointing.

100% Non-Intrusive Performance Management

Unlike other performance management tools on the market, AppSpeed does not require agents, code insertion into applications or the creation of synthetic transactions. AppSpeed is able to monitor application latency non-intrusively by inspecting packets flowing over a host’s vSwitches.

Reduce Barriers to Virtualizing Business-Critical Applications

Eliminate performance concerns about virtualizing enterprise applications and realize dramatic OPEX and CAPEX savings. Show concerned application owners application performance measurements before and after migration to a virtualized environment and easily demonstrate that performance is not negatively impacted by virtualization.

 

 

Using VMware vCenter AppSpeed:

VMware vCenter AppSpeed enables VMware vSphere administrators to gain deep insight into the performance of their virtualized multi-tier applications and ensure SLAs. VMware vSphere administrators traditionally lack the ability to determine the performance of applications running in VMware environments. They are often the first to be blamed for performance issues unless they are able to show that the issues are not caused by the virtualization platform. AppSpeed is designed to measure the latency experienced by application end users and correlate it to the different tiers of the underlying physical and virtual infrastructure. This ensures SLAs for quality of service are met, and reduces perceived risks of migrating enterprise applications to a virtual environment.

• Assured Migration.
  AppSpeed can be used to measure performance of an application, both prior to and after migration to a virtualized environment, to demonstrate to application owners that virtualization does not have a negative impact on application performance.
• SLA Monitoring.
  AppSpeed enables auto-mapping of an environment to provide administrators greater visibility into the relationship between virtual machines and applications. Dependency mapping groups virtual machines into logical units and provides an end-to-end view of application performance. Out-of-the-box views and dashboards identify the worst performing applications, applications with declining performance, and applications experiencing high network error rates.
• Root Cause Analysis and Performance Optimization.
  AppSpeed delivers a comprehensive set of tools for triaging and troubleshooting performance issues. Administrators can view latency from the broadest application level down to the finest level of detail (transaction or database query), while breaking that latency into contributing components (infrastructure, network and application). AppSpeed collects time series data to enable trend identification and help with root cause analysis. It automatically calculates baselines and helps users create performance thresholds.

How Does VMware vCenter AppSpeed Work?

AppSpeed maps application elements and dependencies, and monitors performance based primarily on network traffic.

AppSpeed examines packets traveling between the tiers of a multitier application as they flow through virtual switches onVMware® ESX® hosts. AppSpeed does this non-intrusively, requiring neither agents, nor code insertion, nor creation of synthetic transactions. AppSpeed collects and displays relevant usage information such as transactions, and hits, providing the insight necessary to understand the impact of usage variance and growth on application performance.

AppSpeed provides both real-time and historical performance data to provide insight into trends and alert administrators when performance falls below required service levels. AppSpeed auto-discovers and maps applications and application elements based on recognized protocols, including:

• Web applications (e.g .Net, J2EE, php etc): HTTP, HTTPS
• Microsoft Exchange (RPC)
• Databases: MySQL, Microsoft SQL server, Oracle

Integrated Architecture
AppSpeed is deployed using two types of virtual appliances. AppSpeed Probes are deployed on each VMware ESX host and communicate to the AppSpeed server. The AppSpeed server collects data from the probes as well as from the VMware vCenter Server and stores, then analyzes and serves data to the AppSpeed user interface (UI). The AppSpeed UI is fully integrated into the VMware vSphere Client.

Flexible Mapping Capabilities Supports Physical, Virtual or Hybrid Environments
AppSpeed probes can be mapped to a SPAN port on a physical switch to measure performance of either purely physical or hybrid environments. AppSpeed can monitor environments with a physical database and all other elements virtualized, without the need to map to a physical switch.

Key Features of VMware vCenter AppSpeed:

VMware vCenter AppSpeed, part of the VMware vCenter family of management products, lets you ensure performance levels for virtualized multi-tier applications.

• Application Discovery and Mapping -  Discovers and maps applications, infrastructure and dependencies
• Performance and SLA Monitoring - Monitors end-user experience of multi-tier applications
• Root Cause Analysis -  Helps users quickly identify the cause of performance issues

Application Discovery and Mapping

• Auto discovery: Dynamically discover virtual and physical infrastructure elements.
• Application mapping. Maps application and server dependencies, groups workloads into logical applications, and maps application elements to virtual machines.

Performance and SLA Monitoring

• Monitors latency: Non-intrusively monitor real-time end-user latency for multi-tier applications.
• Trend analysis: View historical trend for performance, errors and usage. Enables users to examine usage trends and their effect on performance levels.
• SLA thresholds: Set thresholds based on desired service level targets and historical baselines.
• Performance management: Provides out-of-the-box performance management and usage tracking reports.

Root Cause Analysis

• Troubleshooting: Quickly identify the component responsible for a performance issue, down to the transaction level.
• Correlation: Correlates latency to the different elements of the environment (infrastructure, network and application).

Documentation:

VMware vCenter AppSpeed Data Sheet (.PDF)