Introduction to IT Performance Management

Background

IT Performance Management (IT PM) is the practice of using performance monitoring to collect, identify, assess, forecast, and correct performance problems. It is a key function of IT Service Management.

CMS data centers perform monitoring within the CMS Processing Environments for various purposes, including, but not limited to:

  • Security monitoring (intrusion detection system, firewalls, logs, incidents, etc.)

  • IT Compliance monitoring (configuration management, policies, etc.)

  • Resource monitoring (utilization, capacity, aging, etc.)

  • Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) (monitoring of business process performance)

  • Infrastructure Performance Monitoring (IPM) (availability, outages, throughput, latency, etc.)

  • Application Performance Monitoring (APM) (transaction response time, throughput, integrity, etc.)

All of these purposes inform the monitoring framework for inspecting and controlling IT systems at CMS. Because the same tools and procedures often address more than one purpose concurrently, there is potential for significant overlap in monitoring for each of these purposes.

Purpose

The guidance in this chapter introduces performance monitoring concepts, differentiates performance monitoring from performance testing, and identifies key business rules for the CMS Processing Environments.

IT PM should be applied to all performance-critical business or infrastructure applications. This chapter provides guidance to application owners, developers, and maintainers in the following areas:

  • Deciding which application behaviors to instrument based on business objectives

  • Determining how to instrument application behaviors

  • Defining application performance metrics and standards

Scope

This chapter represents the IT PM Architecture standards that should be used by CMS and CMS / Contractor partners for CMS Processing Environments. Application Performance Monitoring is a key focus of this chapter. Monitoring requirements for other purposes, specifically security and operations monitoring, are covered in CMS ARS and in other CMS TRA chapters.

IT PM applies best to IaaS Clouds and traditional virtualized data centers. IT PM can be performed on PaaS Clouds and even SaaS Clouds, but there will be challenges due to the lack of access to the hosting platform.