Myriads of applications run
businesses worth billions of dollars today. Thousands of network components
support these business-critical applications and hundreds of sites are
dependent on them. All this sums up to create a complex architecture which is
beyond the imagination of a common man who just wants his application to be
live all the time. For example, look at the recent high profile RIM outage which
affected millions of users, who were kept in dark for four continuous days,
worldwide. One definitely doesn’t want to be in such a situation in their
business. The lesson we should learn from the RIM situation is how proactive an
IT system should be to handle a crisis effectively while giving end users minimum
downtime or taking things to the next level to ensure that users are least
affected. The key question, however, is how can you avoid outages like RIM and keep
your applications available all the time?

Today
performance-management applications have become the most critical aspect
for any IT-management department. Engineers work round the clock to make
sure that applications are live 24×7. Despite of all their efforts there are
times when outages take place. Are engineers to blame for this? Are these
incidents inevitable? I would say NO to both these questions.

When we run applications in
complex environments we also need tools that give visibility to what’s
happening in those applications and other underlying components on a real-time
basis. Such requirements gave rise to the need for real-time IT. No, I am not
proposing a new marketing jargon here. We already have enough of those to
bother with a new one! Let me explain what real-time IT is, with a diagram.

In the research report,