Managing Distributed Applications: Troubleshooting in a Hetergeneous Environment with Cdrom
Authors: Mike Hicks
Venue:  (2000)

From the Book:PREFACE: PrefaceComing from an entirely network-centric background, I would like to believe that it is the network (on its own) that is totally responsible for the business bottom line, but over the years, I have come to accept that the real power lies in the application.I started to come to this conclusion as the faults I was asked to track down moved away from simple link failures and configuration issues to more subtle "poor performance" issues. I began to see that these problems were seldom caused entirely by overloaded WAN or LAN links. As a result, I began to see a need to actually profile the application (from a network point of view), that is, to understand the client/server traffic needed to actually complete the transaction. I quickly observed that this system was dependent on many outside influences and that any one discrepancy in the process could cause the whole system to crumble.This understanding of the process helped to close the gap between the application developers and support staff. If we could show them the interaction between their application and the infrastructure components and protocols, then together we could expedite resolution, eliminate the majority of finger-pointing associated with cross-group issues, and (probably most importantly) provide baseline information. Armed with this information, the developers could then scale their application for deployment and provide the network architects with realistic figures to design and upgrade the underlying infrastructure.This had obvious implications to the enterprise world, and with the advancements in policy-based networking and application-aware networking, we begantosee these profiles as an integral part of a network architectÕs skill set. Consider this: If we can manage the application, we are no longer restricted to delivering (or selling) bandwidth between sitesÑwe can just deliver applications. Because, letÕs face it, the end-user ultimately doesnÕt care if their data traverses a 2MB or 622MB circuit as long as the response meets their expectations (and business needs). So in theory, our underlying infrastructure can become more cost-effective, and in a sense, dynamic.This book is divided into two parts. The first describes a methodology and set of rules that can be used when both baselining and troubleshooting an application. The second concentrates on what I consider to be the main application sets, and details their physical and logical make-ups, the interaction between the various components, and their associated dependencies. All this is then combined to demonstrate application management from a network point of view in the delivery of the case studies.The information in this book should provide you with a good starting point. It would be impossible to explore and detail every possible configuration and scenario, so hopefully, this book gives you a basic understanding of application operation. The ACM Portal is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2010 ACM, Inc. Terms of Usage Privacy Policy Code of Ethics Contact Us Useful downloads: Adobe Acrobat QuickTime Windows Media Player Real Player