Pipeline Publishing, Volume 5, Issue 5

	This Month's Issue:
	What's New in Performance Management?

Can You Manage?
Performance Management Essentials

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Steve Guthrie, Director of Product Marketing with CA, agrees that performance management is essential, and states that the nature of the game is changing. Expectations are different. There was a time when network quality boiled down to availability. That's no longer the key issue. "Availability isn't so much a problem anymore. CSPs have redundant routes and reliable equipment. That can get service to the user." The real issue, Guthrie says, is "the performance of that network. Although availability is not assured, more important KPIs are jitter, delay, packet loss." These metrics roll up to QoS. According to Guthrie, "The two are intertwined."

Cost is an issue as well. "[Performance Management] can help reduce OpEx and CapEx," says Kincl, and it can also "help validate the level of service being provided, and help planning new Services."

In its case study with SK Telecom, HP explores how SK Telecom was able to successfully launch its Next-Generation Marketing system, and use HP's performance management solutions to help it meet its goals. Kelly Jeong, Manager of the IT Infrastructure Management Team for the Information Technology R&D Center of SK Telecom, had this to say about the success of the endeavor:

Software-as-a-Service is impacting all levels of IT, so why not performance management?

There are specific pain points CSPs have with regard to performance management:

According to Kincl:

"By nature, performance management is highly tied to the infrastructure it is monitoring. It needs to have a solid understanding of the models (both resource and service) to be able to make meaningful analysis. As new technologies are introduced, existing systems may not have the flexibility to incorporate the new technologies. There is also a need to understand implications of performance characteristics of new technologies—this can only happen with time and good analysis.
Translating from the performance of the resources and the resource-facing services to the quality of service delivered to customers.
Performance management data is often kept within operations or network engineering, and not utilized to capture its fullest benefit."

"We could achieve the same level of stability as that of the mainframe we had been using for the past decade after the NGM system was opened. As for the NGM system, we can now accommodate more than 1,800 transactions per second. SK Telecom aims to exceed even this rate of transaction. SK Telecom has been able to maintain the stability of its IT systems by adapting to business changes through performance testing, although we have carried out many additional projects in the year since the system had been launched."

So what's the future? Guthrie says it lies in performance management solutions, like the one offered by CA, becoming a software that CSPs use as the foundation of their services. Software-as-a-Service is impacting all levels of IT, so why not performance management? It's a definite possibility as a trend for tomorrow.

Guthrie also makes mention of the possibilities for in-depth monitoring as a tiered service.

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