Application Performance Management

Actional Complements Application Performance Management (APM) Solutions

Companies are looking to Progress® Actional® to supplement performance and availability requirements not met by their application performance management solution, but critical to optimizing application success.

Actional and Application Performance Management: The Differences

Here's how Actional differs from, and complements, traditional APM systems:

• Actional has deep visibility into message payloads. For example, you can keep detailed logs to diagnose data issues, functional problems, or business exceptions as well as business-level audit trails of an activity (with sensitive data such as credit card numbers filtered out). Also unique to Actional, you can monitor transactions by customer, region, channel, or other business dimension, to track history, alert on issues, and change application behavior related to business SLAs.
  
  
  Figure: Dashboard showing multi-dimensional business metrics.
  
  
• Actional traces end-to-end transactions across many tiers. When issues occur, Actional can snapshot an individual unique transaction and provide information on every tier and every instance in clustered system, with no measurable performance overhead. Consequently, you can use Actional to detect and diagnose the root cause of sporadic issues or situational problems (e.g., those that only affect one channel or customer). In contrast, APM systems provide deep visibility into a server or within an application.
  
  
• Actional can isolate issues within a single, unique, end-to-end transaction. You can know about each transaction: how important it is, where it is, whether it is progressing successfully, or whether it is having issues. This is critical because some transactions - e.g., those with a very high value—are more important than others. If you only look at averages or a random sampling of transactions, important transactions are invisible.
  
  
• Actional supports asynchronous and long-running business processes. For example, Actional can measure time from "order through provisioning" for a telecommunications company and, combined with the above characteristics, can measure business SLAs such as "order through provisioning per channel partner." Actional can also proactively notify you or trigger a corrective action when a process doesn't reach a certain stage of execution before a given deadline.
  
  
• Actional can optimize the execution of transactions. Transactions can be optimized and prioritized based on business value. For example, with Actional you can give preferential processing to your best customers.
  
  
• Actional has always-on discovery of changes. You need to explicitly tell most APM tools which services to monitor. When an application changes over time, you only see what you've told the tool to see. In contrast, Actional's always-on auto-discovery immediately detects and begins tracking new services and dependencies. It can detect problems you never thought of, so you're never running blind.
  
  
• Actional has the ability to run, with full capabilities, in production without affecting performance. Many APM solutions require that you turn down visibility to limit latency and overhead.

In short, Actional uniquely provides automatic visibility into real-time processing, snapshot views of individual end-to-end transaction, and dynamic controls for improving transaction processing. As a result, it completes the equation for businesses to achieve complete business transaction assurance.