Application Monitoring Blog

Written By: Beth Schultz (NetworkWorld)
(Original Article)

As Bojan Simic, president of IT analyst firm Trac Research, points out in new research note, “application performance management” (APM) has generated a ton of buzz over the last couple of years. Numerous vendors, be they providing APM specifically or wrapping APM functions into traditional management platforms, have glommed onto the term, promising value propositions such as end-to-end visibility and improved IT-business alignment.

“APM has gotten to the point where the term doesn’t mean a whole lot anymore – when you see demos and talk to customers, it’s obvious that many ‘APM’ vendors really shouldn’t be competing against each other. People have got to understand that the APM bucket really consists of five or six different classes of technologies,” Simic says. Read the rest of this entry »

Written By: Beth Schultz, NetworkWorld

(Original Article)

“Know your users” has long been a guiding principle for IT managers assessing and selecting new technologies. But when dealing with application performance issues, IT’s motto needs to be “know what your users are experiencing.”

That’s because if you monitor how real users interact with applications as part of their daily work, you’ll receive fewer complaints about application issues — and who doesn’t welcome fewer resource-grabbing, time-consuming help desk calls? Read the rest of this entry »

Retailers Integrate End-User Experience to Increase Application Usability and Reduce User Complaints

BOSTON, MA, Sep 08, 2010 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) — By integrating the experience of end users with application design, companies in Aberdeen’s study have improved application performance, reduced complaints from end users about application issues, and have noticed an overall increase in the quality of the end user’s experience. The latest research report, End-User Experience Monitoring and Management, announced by Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company /quotes/comstock/13*!hhs/quotes/nls/hhs (HHS 10.74, +0.09, +0.85%) , finds that companies that implement monitoring of the user’s experience also see improvements in application availability and response times, increased visibility into the performance of business transactions, and a reduction in the average time it takes to find and repair application issues.

The research report delivers hard-hitting facts based on responses from over 170 companies, and investigates the steps that top performing companies have taken to use the experience of end users to improve their business. Read the rest of this entry »

Written by: Beth Bacheldor, Network Computing
(Original Article)

Application management–particularly solutions with built-in automation designed to help organizations monitor and manage performance and availability from a cohesive, end-to-end view–are becoming top concerns for both IT and business executives, according to a new study conducted by research and consulting firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). In fact, in 53 percent of the companies EMA surveyed, C-level IT executives, directors and managers are shaping application management their organization’s application strategy, and in 42 percent of those surveyed, C-level executives are directly involved in planning, implementing or promoting application management, compared to 37 percent in 2008.  Director-level executives are involved in 29 percent of companies surveyed, versus 18 percent  in 2008. Moreover, application management acquisitions are increasingly being funded out of IT executive versus IT operations budgets, the survey found.

EMA conducted the survey in late 2009, querying more than 150 respondents that met certain criteria, including familiarity with enterprise application deployment, maintenance, monitoring or management as IT specialists, managers responsible for application support teams, or line-of-business professionals involved in application management. Potential respondents were also screened regarding the types of “enterprise applications” they were managing. Nearly half the respondents were from enterprise-sized companies, those with 10,000 or more employees. The remaining were fairly evenly distributed among smaller companies, varying in size from less than 250 up to 10,000. Read the rest of this entry »

Written By: Michael Biddick, NetworkComputing
(Original Article)

Previously, we looked at laying the foundation for an APM solution, but now it’s time to get to work. We introduced Jim – a veteran IT manager who lacks any APM solution. As we discussed, he needs to establish key performance indicators around a critical application, including performance metrics and SLAs. His billing system also has a service catalog and detailed security and reporting modules built into the system. As a Web-based application, the backend database is distributed and the application serves just under 2,000 users. As Jim lacks application fault or performance monitoring, he really is starting from scratch. So we are going to start with creating a document Jim can use for his requirements and build his business case.

Jim’s first inclination was to search the Internet and analysts like Gartner for potential APM vendor products that might fit in his environment. After some discussion, we encouraged Jim to first build a business case that includes his requirements. Even though time is short, and Jim is under pressure to deploy a solution, to effectively evaluate the APM vendors he needs to understand what specific technical and business requirements he has. Otherwise, even the seasoned IT manager may get lost in a sea of marketing. Read the rest of this entry »

Written by: Bojan Simic, TracResearch
(Original Article)

In October of 2010, when we launched TRAC Research, we based our approach for covering IT performance management technologies on two advises that we were given by end-users:

• Don’t evaluate products by throwing them into technology buckets, but talk about what these products can do in specific usage scenarios

• Distinguish impactful from “cool” technologies, meaning discover what are the measurable business benefits from deploying a technology solution, not how “hot” the technology is

We thought that the best approach for doing this would be to launch an end-user survey and ask folks that are using this technology what their experiences are. This is when things started to get really messy. Before we even formulated the questions, we conducted close to 150 interviews with end-users, executives of technology vendors, prominent writers and some true thought leaders in this space to make sure that the questions are spot on to what they care about. Just to clarify, none of us are rookies in this space and for me, this is the 18^th survey of this type that I’ve created. Although, this time, launching the survey was more “interesting” than usual. Read the rest of this entry »

Keep users happy with service-level agreements and application performance management.

Written By: Michael Biddick, InformationWeek
(Original Article)

Lots of IT organizations use an informal metric for measuring how satisfied employees are with application performance: If they aren’t calling the help desk, things must be OK. But this is less a strategy than an avoidance tactic. Proactive organizations will work with business units to create internal service-level agreements that define acceptable performance metrics. An SLA provides a formal mechanism for CIOs to report on progress in meeting performance goals–and to demonstrate to business leaders the very valuable services that IT provides.

Of course, if we’re going to offer SLAs, we must measure service levels with some kind of quantifiable metric. This is where application performance management comes in. APM tools are a vital source of information about the components that support an application, including software, server hardware, and network systems. Read the rest of this entry »

Written by: Beth Schultz, NetworkWorld
(Original Article)

In a recent interview, Jimmy Harris, managing director of cloud computing at Accenture, a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, shared his thoughts on how the job of IT management will change over time as enterprises take a more services-centric view of their worlds. His advice in a nutshell:

If you’ve got a penchant to know everything about anything, then you best shake it. And, likewise, polish your IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)-like service management knowledge and business acumen.

Here’s why, he explains. As more robust cloud services bubble up, abstraction of infrastructure will become the IT endgame. “Enterprises won’t be managing infrastructure from an operational and service delivery perspective but essentially acquiring it as services,” he says. Read the rest of this entry »

Written By: Krishnan Subramanian
(Original Article)

SaaS is slowly gaining adoption not just in the small and mid market range but also in big enterprises. According to a new Gartner report “Software as a Service 2009-2014″, the SaaS revenues within the enterprise software market will grow in 2010 by 14.1 percent from the 2009 revenues. In 2009, the revenues were $7.5 billion and it is growing to $8.5 billion this year.

Written by: Robert Bravery
(Original Article)

A website or blog’s load time is pivotal to it’s success. Studies have shown that the highest cause of users abandoning a site is because it takes too long to load.

It’s a strange world we live in where patience is not the order of the day. We have faster computers, faster internet, better looking websites, interactive sites. Yet users still want that instant gratification.

It’s a never ending spiral. The more you put into your site to make it more attractive and interactive, the faster users expect it to load.

Google Incorporating page load into rankings

Google has incorporated site speed into their ranking algorithms. Although not a significant part, it is Google’s way of suggesting to us to get our sites to load faster. Read the rest of this entry »