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.

What that means, he adds, is that before enterprise IT managers explore their APM options, they must carefully assess their application environments – how many users are using what sorts of applications, for example – and then determine what exactly they want from an APM tool. Do they want to monitor the end-user experience or business transactions, for example? Do they want to feed APM data into and integrate with business service, network performance or database monitoring platforms? Coming to that sort of understanding will help narrow the field of choices, Simic says.

Meantime, he adds, IT managers can expect to see tool vendors focus in on proactive management capabilities in 2011.

“Today when APM vendors say something is being proactively managed, that oftentimes means the tool sends an alert and then you try to figure out what’s going on. But to be really proactive, you need to understand the problem is coming before people start complaining about it – and vendors are working to differentiate themselves on this now,” Simic says.

In addition, vendors also will be working on enabling deeper views into the user experience, he says.

“It’s becoming more important to do more than actually just measure availability or speed of an application,” Simic says. “You want to know if an application is being used and, if so, which particular features. You also need to know about business impact – if an application performance problem is only affected two vs. 2,000 people, fixing the problem might not be so pressing.”

Lastly, he adds, in 2011 APM vendors also will distinguish themselves on how well their tools do at tracking the performance of applications as they move dynamically around a virtual environment.