HP’s TECH SESSIONS AT SD WEST 2004

Why Should Developers Care About Manageability?
Florence Perot
Wednesday, March 17, 8:30am – 10:00am

A survey conducted in 2003 reported that 74% of respondents experienced regular application failures, and in roughly half of those cases, the failure caused more than three hours of down time. Depending on the business, three hours of critical downtime can be very costly. In the same survey 73% of respondents reported inadequate visibility into critical applications and services. This is where application manageability enter the scene to minimize and even sometimes prevent such costly situations. Simple manageability can tell when a database goes down. Advanced manageability can tell that the database failure will cause the business to lose thousands dollars in orders every hour it is down. Software developers can no doubt appreciate the benefits that improved manageability (and thus decreased downtime) can deliver to a company’s bottom line. However, application manageability can also deliver direct benefit to developers. This session will present the importance of application manageability to developers. It will also show how insufficient manageability can be strongly correlated with application failure and in turn led directly to longer down times.

Is Your Application Management-Ready?
Claire Rogers
Wednesday, March 17, 10:30am – 12:00pm

Development managers familiar with software process improvements know that the cost of finding and fixing development problems increases as an application reaches use by customers. The same principle is true for the cost of managing applications in deployment. The costs of diagnosing runtime problems and determining their solutions increase with respect to the phases of the application lifecycle. To help reduce costs and deliver high-quality applications, developers can design for better manageability in the application itself. This session introduces several ways to develop better programs by designing and implementing management capabilities into programs and encompassing two levels of support, for the PLATFORM and the APPLICATION level. This session reviews some of the technologies available for making your applications management ready, including JMX, WMI, ARM, SNMP, and message logging.

Web Services Distributed Management
Judi Cowell
Wednesday, March 17, 1:30pm – 3:00pm

Now more than ever before, the business success of an enterprise is directly tied to the capabilities and performance of its IT systems. Systems must be available, they must be responsive, and they must be correct. And, as demands for services fluctuate and business needs change, they must also be adaptable. With the growth of the Internet and web-based applications, there is also an increasing dependence on services and other IT resources that are provided by external organizations. In the face of all these requirements, a properly functioning enterprise-quality system is separated from chaos by effective system management—a task that is becoming increasingly complicated by the increasing numbers and types of resources that need to be managed and their often global distribution. In this session we discuss the standards efforts of the OASIS Web Service Distributed Management (WSDM) TC to define web services management, including using web services architecture and technology to manage distributed resources to enable management of a globally distributed heterogeneous system.

Developing for Manageability with WMI
Stephen DuBravac
Wednesday, March 17, 3:30pm – 5:00pm

Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is an important technology for the Windows platform that can improve an application’s ROI. This session shows how developers can use a new plug-in to Visual Studio.NET to improve the manageability of their application with WMI. The HP OpenView Application Management Instrumentation Add-on offers an intuitive interface that provides suggestions for adding manageability. The tool facilitates instrumenting applications with Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) helping developers to avoid the complexities associated with this technology. Within the tool, a test facility is also provided to explicitly check the WMI instrumentation. The developer is free to add health, diagnostic, and performance related management functionality to their applications with the full support of context sensitive help documentation giving them the information they need when they need it.

Developing for Manageability with JMX
Claire Rogers
Thursday, March 18, 8:30am – 10:00am

Adding manageability to a J2EE application is often left as a deployment exercise in an IT organization. Developers often resort to simple error logging or require the IT staff to determine why the application is not behaving properly. This can often result in additional time diagnosing and fixing the application. There are a number of steps that can be taken early in the development phase to ensure that an application can be easily managed and monitored in production. This session takes a look at Java Management Extensions (JMX) technology specifically and offers a detailed description on the technology and how it can be applied to a real world example. The session will include a discussion of the importance of adding manageability to an application, and will focus on some of the capabilities offered through the A live demonstration will be shown illustrating how an existing J2EE application built with BEA WebLogic Workshop can be instrumented with JMX calls. As a result of attending this session, you will get a better sense of the capabilities offered by JMX.