The secret to exploiting your investment in messaging middleware!

Messaging Middleware – Large enterprises generally expend about ¼ of their entire IT budget on the systems and processes to connect the disparate systems that make up complex application stacks.

When you look at how business processes are architected, they nearly always make use of a myriad of different infrastructure elements, platforms and applications, and these are all interconnected using an array of messaging middleware systems that ensure that every single request is processed even when the capacity and performance of some components causes requests to be stacked in queues.

Modern architectures make use of multiple data centers including some that are cloud-based, and this can add latency-based delays that require careful consideration. Each messaging middleware system requires carefully deployed rules to ensure that every single transaction is correctly processed. Once setup these systems are often left untouched for many years, because even simple changes such as updating releases can require thousands of FTE hours of regression testing. This can lead to some systems being used even when the releases that are in place are no longer supported, and this can become an expensive risk to the business from a compliance, performance and reliability perspective. To counter these risks most companies make use of rigorous change management processes that ensure that any request for a change is carefully audited and tested before being deployed, but this can lead to significant delays in deploying changes or even new applications.

These challenges often lead to the business avoiding making changes to their messaging middleware architecture, instead making use of new systems for each new iteration of deployments. But this then leads to a multitude of new management issues, not least of which is system sprawl, and the associated risks that that leads to.

But if you can find a way of solving these messaging middleware “complexity fatigue” issues, and instead could find a way to normalize the management of messaging middleware, then the raw knowledge that you have codified into these systems about your business could become available to your business users, and this opens up new avenues of innovation that can save you spending in many other areas as well as delivering improved user experience, performance, GRC and Decision Support.

That’s where Nastel can help, we have invested extensively to build a platform that allows businesses to simplify their management of messaging middleware. This allows all of your messaging middleware servers to be managed centrally in a consistent way, from a single web-based application. This solves the security and privacy concerns associated with allowing individual developers to manage their own queues by allowing the administration team to put in place access controls for each user and team. Changes can then be managed across even the largest environment in bulk with simple search, select, move, cut/paste type functionality with full scheduling and auditable change logs. This will save many thousands of FTE hours of work and can accelerate change management significantly.

But this is just the start of how Nastel can help you improve your business. Through our ability to read the messaging middleware configuration information and actual message contents, we can provide a visual trace of each transaction flowing through your entire application stack, and this can be presented as a topological visualization of that application stack. Then we can automatically compare each transaction to the historical record of similar transactions, overlaying the performance data of each system to the transaction and dynamically identify any specific transaction or group of transactions that exhibits the tell-tale indicators of an issue, in effect providing a predictive capability of performance issues. This is then supplemented by automatic root-cause analysis using advanced machine learning, allowing issues that would have previously required large teams to discuss in war-room scenarios to be eliminated and replaced with automated alerts and automated remedial processes that can avoid whole classes of performance events from ever happening. This process can in-effect either supplement or replace your existing APM processes and some consider it a form of advanced AIOPS, but the bottom line is that it can materially save you a significant part of your existing operations (or DevOps) budget, while allowing you to dramatically improve your MTTR and MTBF measures.

Further, Nastel can also provide you with the ability to monitor even the most complex transactions and report on them in ways that can simplify your regulatory reporting requirements, because you can now use the messaging middleware architecture to visualize exactly what the authorities need you to report on, in the format they need to see, and can even track the submission processes to ensure that every trade or required submission is correctly submitted and acknowledged. Any submission that is either rejected or not confirmed as submitted can be presented as an alert that can be managed, corrected and approved.

The business intelligence you can discover by seeing your business through the lens of messaging middleware provides an entirely additional dimension to your understanding of what your users experience, and this “abstracted view” can be valuable in deciding what changes to make to your architecture and predicting what impact these will have on performance and user acceptance.

Nastel has created a bundle that is expressly designed to optimize your use of messaging middleware, we call it Nastel Navigator X. Using Nastel Navigator X will save your money, time and resources and will ultimately improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your operations, improving your business. If you are looking for a way to improve your business while reducing your costs, consider Nastel Navigator X.

Many enterprises, including some of the largest businesses in the world currently rely on Nastel, and with today’s pressure to reduce costs while improving performance, maybe Nastel Navigator X is exactly what you are looking for.