PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT TOOL HAVING UNIFIED ANALYSIS REPORT

• US 20110055817A1
• Filed: 09/02/2009
• Published: 03/03/2011
• Est. Priority Date: 09/02/2009
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Dynatrace LLC (Dynatrace, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Compuware Corporation (KKR & Co., Inc.)
• Inventors: HARSHFIELD, Terrence V., NOBLE, William, SHASHIDHARA, Sithanshu K., BEADLE, Rosina M., GATZ, Bartosz, DUNN, Bryce, ZIEMIANOWICZ, Krzysztof, ALLMACHER, Kristen, DUNST, Jerry Amos
• Granted Patent: US 8,327,335 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 717/127
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/32 with visual or acoustical indication of the functioning of the machine
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3409 for performance assessment
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3447 Performance evaluation by modeling
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3457 Performance evaluation by simulation
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3476 Data logging G06F11/14, G06F11/2205 take precedence
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2201/80 Database-specific techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2201/87 Monitoring of transactions

Abstract

An improved method is provided for identifying a cause of a performance problem experienced by an application in a computing environment. To help a user find and isolate the problem quicker, the method proposes a unified performance analysis report that presents the most likely indicators of the source of the performance problem. The report presents performance metrics for the software services used by the application and charts the metric values over time since it is often the change in a metric that indicates a problem. Each metric chart should also include an indicator for the state of service for the application. This will help the user correlate metrics from multiple sources to the time period in which the application experienced a problem.

Claims

1. A performance management tool that monitors performance of a software application in a computing environment, comprising:

a service model residing in a data store that maps each software application in the computing environment to respective computing infrastructure that supports the software application;

a service manager embodied as computer executable instructions in a computer memory, the service manager is configured to detect a change in a state of service provided by a given software application along with a time at which the change occurred and generate a report, having one or more graphs, for the given software application using the service model, each graph depicts a metric over a period of time and an indicator for the state of service associated with the given software application, where the metric provides a basis for the state of service associated with the given software application, the metric and the indicator are shown in relation to a time axis of the graph, and the time period includes the time at which the change in the state of service occurred.

2. The performance management tool of claim 1 wherein the report further includes a graphical representation for a portion of the service model that corresponds to the given software application.

3. The performance management tool of claim 1 wherein the service model is further defined by a tree data structure having nodes representing software applications which are linked to other nodes that represent software services used by the respective software application.

4. The performance management tool of claim 3 wherein nodes representing the software services have leaf nodes depending therefrom that represent metrics associated to the respective software service.

5. The performance management tool of claim 1 wherein the indicator for the state of service associated with a software application is color coded to display different colors for different states of service.

6. The performance management tool of claim 1 wherein the service manager identifies software services that support the application using the service model, identifies metrics associated with each of the identified software service, and groups the identified metrics into groups of metrics having similar data types, where each group of metrics forms a basis for a graph in the report.

7. The performance management tool of claim 6 wherein a graph includes a line in a corresponding group of metrics and each line correlates to a different software service that supports the application.

8. The performance management tool of claim 6 wherein the service manager orders the graphs based upon the impact of the metrics in a given graph to the application.

9. The performance management tool of claim 1 wherein the report is presented to a user as a graphical user interface on a display device.

10. A method for identifying a cause of a performance problem experienced by an application in a computing environment, comprising:

identifying software services that support an application experiencing a performance problem, each software service having a service type and one or more performance metrics associated therewith and each performance metric having an associated data type and service quality indicator;

grouping the identified software services into groups of services having a similar service type;

for each group of services, identifying performance metrics associated with the software services in the respective group and grouping the identified performance metrics into groups of metrics having a similar data type;

selecting a subset of groupings from the groups of metrics, where the groupings in the subset have performance metrics with the lowest service quality indicators; and

displaying a chart for each group of metrics in the subset of groupings on a display device, where each chart plots the performance metrics contained in a respective group of metrics in relation to a time axis of the chart.

11. The method of claim 10 further comprises monitoring a state of service provided by the application over time and displaying an indicator for the state of service adjacent to the performance metrics and in relation to the time axis on each chart.

12. The method of claim 11 further comprises displaying different color coded indicators for different states of service.

13. The method of claim 10 further comprises storing a service model in a data store that maps applications in the computing environment to respective software services that support a given application.

14. The method of claim 13 further comprises displaying a graphical representation for a portion of the service model that corresponds to the application experiencing performance problems, concurrently with the charts on the display device.

15. The method of claim 10 further comprises ordering performance metrics within a given group of metrics by corresponding service quality indicators and displaying a predefined number of the performance metrics having the lowest service quality indicators in the chart for the given group of metrics.

16. A method for identifying a cause of a performance problem experienced by an application in a computing environment, comprising:

storing a service model having a tree structure with an application root node whose branches define relationship amongst applications in the computing environment and an infrastructure root node whose branches define the computing infrastructure which comprises the computing environment, where each application having a node in the tree structure and a corresponding link node depending therefrom that maps the application to respective software services that supports the application;

identifying software services that support an application experiencing a performance problem, each software service having a service type and one or more performance metrics associated therewith and each performance metric having an associated data type and service quality indicator;

grouping the identified software services into groups of services having a similar service type;

for each group of services, identifying performance metrics associated with the software services in the respective group and grouping the identified performance metrics into groups of metrics having a similar data type; and

displaying a chart for each group of metrics on a display device, where each chart plots the performance metrics contained in a respective group of metrics in relation to a time axis of the chart.

17. The method of claim 16 wherein identifying software services that support an application further comprises identifying the link node for the application and retrieving performance metrics associated with the application by scanning branches extending from the link node to the leaf nodes.

18. The method of claim 17 further comprises retrieving a grandparent node for each of the retrieved leaf nodes, where each grandparent node defines a grouping of software services associated with the application.

19. The method of claim 16 further comprises, for each grouping of metrics, ordering metrics based on service quality indicator associated with each of the metrics.

20. The method of claim 16 further comprises ordering charts based service quality indicators of the metrics included in each of the charts.

21. The method of claim 16 further comprises monitoring a state of service provided by the application over time and displaying an indicator for the state of service adjacent to the metrics and in relation to the time axis on each chart.

22. The method of claim 21 further comprises displaying different color coded indicators for different states of service.

23. The method of claim 16 further comprises displaying a graphical representation for a portion of the service model that corresponds to the application experiencing performance problems, concurrently with the charts on the display device.