Understanding the performance of enterprise applications

Companies have gradually abandoned internally developed enterprise applications in favor of commercial ones. These systems are often comprised of different, multi-vendor components, including, Web servers, databases and applications. For most organizations, performance problems are often addressed by acquiring larger servers or increasing network bandwidth. While the performance of an individual component or application can be and is analyzed, the overall performance of the integrated suite of applications remains largely ad hoc and determining the cause of problems becomes trial and error. We report on initial work to address these problems by studying a commercial enterprise application, understanding what information is important, how such information can be gathered and analyzed and what kinds of tools would be beneficial. We report on an analysis tool and some results of using that tool and on the potential of the approach and methodology for larger enterprise environments.