By Tom Farre

Inside Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, if there's a glitch with a room booking, rate quote, reservation charge or any other customer-facing process, VP of IT Keith Kelly knows about it right away. That's thanks to Starwood's central hotel reservation system, known as Valhalla. The system is critical to customer satisfaction at Starwood's 1,000-plus hotels and resorts worldwide.

In fact, Valhalla is a massive, Java-based application. Its numerous processing engines are linked in a complex matrix of dependencies. Written to employ a service-oriented architecture (SOA), Valhalla operates so that a single request to one engine generally involves the interaction of all. While that improves certain efficiencies, it also means that performance glitches in any one process are sometimes difficult to diagnose. "With SOA, we're always battling this 'needle in a haystack' issue," Kelly explains.

To win such battles, Kelly needed a technology fix that could monitor and ensure both the performance and availability of the Valhalla system. And it had to do so before technical issues affected customers – or Starwood's revenue stream.

Kelly's solution: Application Performance Management (APM), which helps Starwood better manage its software development processes and monitor mission-critical SOA applications. "Application Performance Management allows us to isolate performance issues quickly, helping us understand the exact source of any problem," says Kelly, a user of CA Wily APM. "Using the software's customization features, we've created consoles that depict our environment. If booking has a problem, for instance, we can immediately see if the problem's in booking itself, in one of booking's back-end systems or in a once-removed dependency."

Such accurate problem diagnosis contrasts sharply with the processes used by organizations that don't use APM, notes Scott Gilland, a Partner at Accenture and Global Lead of the consulting firm's performance engineering practice. "We see IT staff using code instrumentation or error log files to piece together what might be happening, but they never see the whole picture and often engage in finger-pointing," he says. "What they need is the ability to monitor business transactions from beginning to end across different layers of technology to diagnose the source of performance bottlenecks."

APM helps CIOs do just that. These solutions provide real-time, 24x7 business-transaction monitoring across complex, heterogeneous application and middleware environments. As a result, both operations and IT managers can follow a transaction to ensure a better user experience.