Platform and Application Tuning

This section describes how to configure Ivanti Neurons for ITSM and its platform to optimize performance.

About the WAN Environment

Applications built on the Ivanti Neurons for ITSM platform are commonly used over a WAN link. Whether deployed in a remote data center or used from branch offices, users expect performance reasonably similar to that of the LAN environment. Following the practices outlined in this guide result in a well performing application over the WAN that closely resembles performance on the local network.

To address poor performance over a WAN, it is important to clearly understand the problem. Though low bandwidth can have an impact, the foremost issue affecting WAN performance is latency, the time it takes data to travel from one endpoint to another. The higher the latency of the WAN link, the longer it takes data to traverse the link. High latency results in delays that can cause users to wait minutes for simple operations to complete.

To combat the higher latency of a WAN environment, Ivanti Neurons for ITSM was designed to make fewer “chunky” calls, rather than frequent smaller “chatty” calls. In other words, instead of retrieving little bits of data in individual requests, the system retrieves larger data sets in a single request. This well-established design principle reduces the overhead of traversing high-latency links, resulting in much improved application performance.

There are certain configurations and features within Ivanti Neurons for ITSM that can affect the behavior of the application, causing it to be more or less chatty, specifically, caching business objects and definitions and using script expressions. This guide covers these areas in detail and provides guidelines for keeping these areas in check.

This section does not describe how to fix network or WAN problems. Rather, this section focuses on ensuring that Ivanti Neurons for ITSM is configured to behave in a manner that produces acceptable performance on a well performing WAN.