latoga labs

Visiting With a Performance Tuning Guru

March 18, 2007 Leave a Comment

A few weeks ago my good friend Jon Hodgson was visiting me over the weekend. Jon and I worked together for over five years at Resonate during the startup, through IPO, to acquisition of the company (quite an interesting 5 year ride). Jon has spent the last few years, from Resonate through today, focusing on multi-tiered application performance tuning. This is a complex area that can contain all sorts of technologies within the Enterprise infrastructure (i.e., firewalls, networks, servers, web servers, application servers, database, middleware). He is currently the guy in this area at OPNET with their Panorama product.

If you have a multi-tier application (and who doesn’t today) and are running into performance issues, you need to give Jon and his team a call. He shared with me some of the work he has been doing in this area with clients, and the advances that he has been involved with in this area since we last worked together are amazing.

He showed me some of the capabilities that Panorama and the OPNET technologies have, and my jaw kept hitting the floor. With Panorama, he showed me how the tool can display the communication between each tier in a multi-tiered application, drill into the part of the communication that is causing the most latency, and then pinpoint the source of that latency within the multi-tiered environment. Like that wasn’t enough, he then combined the Panorama capabilities with ACE to then predict what would happen to the application’s performance if various changes were made to the network environment. Like what would happen if you added a firewall and only 1ms of latency between a Java application server and a database?

Jon and I were involved with building some of the early capabilities for a tool in this area at Resonate before the company was acquired and taken private. The recording, playback and predictive simulation capabilities of the tools that Jon has been involved with building at OPNET are mind blowing compared to what we were working on eight years ago! While I haven’t been involved in this space for a few years, I also know that I haven’t seen anything that comes close to the capabilities of the combined OPNET solutions.

While this tool may not work for everyone, OPNET’s Panorama is definitely one of those hidden gems of the technology world that should be considered by anyone responsible for application performance tuning.

My Coffee Cup Is Talking To Me

March 17, 2007 Leave a Comment

This morning I went to my neighborhood mega-corp coffee shop (they get enough press the way it is, so I’ll give you three guesses to figure out who I’m talking about…and the first two don’t count.) I was having a nice relaxing coffee with my wife and our dog, when all of a sudden my coffee cup started talking to me!

I thought that what is had to say was important enough and relevant enough that I wanted to share it with you. Here is what my coffee cup said to me:

The Way I See It #225 (…figured it out yet?)
“People don’t read enough. And what reading we do is cursory, without absorbing the subtleties and nuances that lie deep within — Wow, you’ve stopped paying attention, haven’t you? People can’t even read a coffee cup without drifting off.”-David Shore
Creator and executive producer of the television drama House.

I find this relevant because I have spent the past 6 months in deeper exploration and participation of the blogosphere…man do I hate that term…the world of self-published content. What I find so interesting about this world is the same thing that most professional journalists originally complained about: the lack of depth within the majority of content.

How many blogs have you gone to where the majority of the postings are just a few sentences that refer you to another posting. Recycled content with no added value. There is nothing wrong with pointing your readers to something that you find interesting, but explain what and why you find it interesting, don’t just say “this was cool…” and provide a link. I don’t even bother looking at, let alone reading or even scanning, blogs like that. That’s the quickest way to get me to unsubscribe from their feed.

This makes me think of a new social phenomenon that I have seen mentioned a lot lately…Twitter. Think of it as a micro-blogging service where you are forced to do short content with the goal of explaining what you are doing right now. Interesting social experiment, but I find it difficult to finding adequate time to write up the items that I really find interesting for here. I also am finding it harder and harder to have large blocks of concentration time to work on items. The last think I need is to break my time up into smaller chucks so I can tell the world what I just did (or didn’t do). Again, what is the value in snippets of thought or meaningless comments about “having lunch with my Grandma”? (Yes, that last one was pulled right from the Twitter website as I write this).

The English language is a wonderful tool that is full of subtleties and nuances that seem to have gotten lost in today’s world. I agree with the Professional Organization of English Majors that we are facing a shortage in this world. Did you see the nuance and subtle reference in that last sentence? As an English Minor, I put it there on purpose. I know that my co-worker would have caught it. The joy of working with him is the nuance and subtleties that he weaves into our every day interaction with clients and co-workers. Granted, being a film major I don’t always catch all the obscure references..but I appreciate knowing that their there. It’s one of the joys of the job. Something akin to the way Gail Wynand would write a world changing editorial on the fly.

I have seen comments in the technology trade rags stating that blogging will start to decline. That we have hit a wall on volume of self-publishing content. I sure hope not. I see self-publishing as a great way to leverage the true spirit and potential of the internet. The challenge that we all face is to not fall into the trap of condensing everything down so it can be easily consumed, turning it into just another puff of air into the hype balloon, and using it to drive readership for an increase in advertising revenue. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem in monetizing your self-publishing to help you pay the bills, I’m a firm believer in needing multiple streams of income in today’s world. But don’t minimize the value in your self-publishing for this return.

I hope to see us use the self-publishing infrastructure to unlock the creativity and greatness that we all have locked inside of us. As I had mentioned in a previous posting, just keep your critical thinking cap on so you can see the true greatness through the rhetoric and propaganda.

That is, unless you’ve already drifted off…

Was Your IT an Hour Late?

March 14, 2007 Leave a Comment

I found the recent DST change here in North America and interesting exercise in advanced planning on behalf of IT departments and IT vendors. How many of you received notices about the DST change and steps you needed to take with regards to your IT infrastructure only a week or two before the change? I’m referring to both your companies IT department as well as your IT vendors (if you don’t think you have any IT vendors as an individual, look at the name printed on the front of your cell phone). More importantly, why did we need to have receive notices about it at all?

This past Monday, my day was busier than usual due to the fact that my calendar was more than slightly screwed up. The early change to Daylight Savings Time (DST) played havoc with my calendar (MS Outlook), even after I applied the so call patch from Microsoft. I had calendar events that were off by an hour and kept receiving unneeded meeting updates from others that I work with. One may wonder if on-demand users were safe from the DST debacle? Unfortunately, the answer is no. I noticed on Monday evening that Google’s Calendar application had the dates wrong too (a meeting scheduled for 8 was showing up at 9). At least all that affected me was my calendar applications.

The US Government pass the Energy Policy Act of 2005 back on July 29th, 2005; this is the act that changed when DST starts and stops. What I find surprising is that I didn’t see any notice about how to update my IT equipment (e.g., home computer, palm pilot) from vendors until only a few weeks ago. I saw home grown notices from Palm users about how to manually update my Treo, but didn’t see anything from Palm until a few days before the DST change. This lag from IT vendors then created a lag from IT departments to their users.

The end result appears to be a breakdown of IT that had wider impact than Y2K. Granted, this appeared to be a slight breakdown and (as far as I know) nothing seriously broke other than calendars. However, I see this as a challenge to IT vendors and IT Managers to focus on improving their advanced planning tactics. There is no reason for the delays we saw with how the DST situation was handled. To me, this was just a slight annoyance. In my opinion, technology vendors and managers need to start focusing on eliminating even these slight annoyances.