Application Performance Management Solutions - Quick Tips

Any organization that is running business critical – time sensitive applications is in need of some sort of performance management system. When looking into what type of performance management tool to invest in - things can get confusing – surfing the web throws you into a sea of empty marketing messages. The label “application performance management” is vastly over used; the following article covers a few things that are not to be missed when considering an application performance management solution.

An Application Performance Management Offering Must Include an End User Monitoring Capability

How else can you know how your application is really performing?

End user monitoring tools provide a wonderful presentation of the bottom line of how your applications are performing. When it comes to web application management there is a long list of network appliances that serve the purpose - giving you a plug and play solution – with no need to install anything on the user’s desktop. But what happens when the end user monitoring tool that you are using for your web application management shows that latencies have gone wild?

You need an application performance management solution that knows how to connect between the latencies that your users are seeing and problem that is causing the latency in the data center.

Now of course in these troubled times the performance management system that you may be looking to invest in must not eat up your entire IT budget. Purchasing more than one performance management tool is simply out of the question and network appliances cannot make that full connection, enabling true application performance management.

An Application Performance Management Tool should aid with Data Center Management

Why settle for an application performance management tool that sees only the application server?

True application performance management cannot be done with your run of the mill server management software; true performance management solutions offer the ability to perform data center management. The need for application performance monitoring tools to provide data center management comes from the complex, distributed and interdependent nature of applications these days. Application performance monitoring solutions must take into consideration the entire data center if they are to perform proper triage of a problem. A lot of data center management tools these days utilize information that is collected from server management software that is installed on various tiers, the problem with this is that you end up collecting a whole bunch of resource consumption metrics that do not correlate to what the end user sees which directly reflects your performance. Not monitoring what the end user sees means that your users could be experiencing major problems with the application which you will only hear about if those users take the time to call customer service. Since there are many cases where server management software shows that availability is fine but transactions are taking too long to process.

Application Performance Management – Monitoring Network Performance

What is your application without the network that it is sitting on?

Monitoring network performance also plays a role in application performance management. Imagine that your end user monitoring tool shows that latencies are too high while the latencies that you measure within your application server are only a small percentage of the total latency that your users are seeing. Only by monitoring network performance will your application performance management tool provide the performance management solution that will cover all of your bases.

Only Business Transaction Management Provides the Single Solution

Monitoring every single transaction from the end user - through the network and all the way to the back end of the data center is the only way for an application performance management solution to cover all of the bases that are listed above. The discipline of doing this is called Business Transaction Management or BTM.