Today, a large number of mission-critical processes are supported by performance sensitive applications. Developers can rapidly create such applications without writing a lot of “infrastructure” code using frameworks such as Java EE, .NET, Ajax and Atlas, etc. These applications can scale quickly by accessing objects and services located on other servers through built-in remoting capabilities – allowing application deployment in a variety of distributed multi-server clustered configurations. SOA and EAI drive this trend further by leveraging existing applications and services in distributed environments. While such frameworks speed development, they also hide inner workings that can contribute significantly to resource consumption, especially if such capabilities are misused. Consequently, mission-critical applications are often deployed with latent performance issues that surface later in production. Industry surveys reveal that:

Performance problems are common in mission critical Java and .NET applications.

• Among companies with $1B or more in revenues, nearly 85% experienced incidents of performance degradation1,
• 40 % of the unplanned downtime is due to application failures, and
• The cost of down time of mission-critical applications averages over $100,000/hour2.
  

Industry surveys also show that:

Problem resolution takes too much time and resources.

• IT groups spend 24% of their time in resolving application slow-downs3, and
• 80% of unplanned downtime can be mitigated by application development and operations working together4.

Clearly, IT personnel spend too much time reacting to performance problems. Current tools are ill-suited for resolving application performance bottlenecks: development tools are inappropriate in production environments for many reasons including high overhead; monitoring tools detect but do not provide detailed diagnostic information necessary to resolve performance problems.

In order to reduce the time to resolve such problems, IT
personnel need a common, easy to use, low overhead
measurement and analysis system that can efficiently collect
necessary and sufficiently detailed diagnostic data, and speed
up root cause analysis.

1 Jean-Pierre Garbani, “Best Practices in Problem Management”, Forrester Research, June 23, 2004

2 Theresa Lanowitz, “Delivering Business Value Through Software Quality”, Gartner Symposium IT Expo 2004, October 17-22, 2004.

3 http://www.e-channelnews.com/ec_storydetail.php?ref=412807 referring to Applied Research survey commissioned by Symantec.

4 Theresa Lanowitz, “Delivering Business Value Through Software Quality”, Gartner Symposium IT Expo 2004, October 17-22, 2004.