Feature Articles
Ensuring application performance is not just about IT operations. Prior to app rollout, the role of development and DevOps teams, and even IT Operations, in preventing application performance problems cannot be underestimated. But how do these diverse teams accomplish this goal? How do they prevent – or even identify – application performance issues before the app is even in production? With these questions in mind, APMdigest asked experts from across Application Performance Management (APM) and related markets for their recommendations on the best ways to ensure application performance before app rollout. This extensive list includes processes, approaches and tools to consider.
APMdigest presents the 18 recommendations in three parts, with six categories presented each day. The first six recommendations presented here start out with development's performance basics including DevOps and APM ...
IT is full of acronyms – so why should you care about Application-Aware Network Performance Management (AANPM)? Put simply, because it can save your organization time and money; help you manage your network, applications and services more effectively; and minimize downtime. The following are five reasons why AANPM matters in today’s enterprise networks ...
A DevOps strategy helps drive tangible business benefits to enterprises, according to a new study conducted by Vanson Bourne for CA Technologies. Respondents with a DevOps strategy experienced anywhere from a 14 to 21 percent improvement in business in the form of increased numbers of customers, faster time-to-market and improved quality and performance of applications ...
Application traffic flows have become less deterministic, and infrastructure architects can no longer rely solely on centralized appliances to provide necessary application delivery and security services. New deployment models are emerging to help enterprises with this transition, and Gartner predicts that by 2018, at least three consolidated network service offerings will emerge with feature sets that span application delivery, global traffic distribution, optimization and security functions ...
APMdigest's annual list of Application Performance Management predictions features industry experts – from analysts and consultants to users and the top vendors – offering thoughtful, insightful, and sometimes controversial predictions on how APM will evolve and impact business in 2015. The final installment, Part 3 is all about all about cloud, virtualization and DevOps ...
APMdigest's annual list of Application Performance Management predictions features industry experts – from analysts and consultants to users and the top vendors – offering thoughtful, insightful, and sometimes controversial predictions on how APM will evolve and impact business in 2015. Part 2 is all about analytics, Big Data, and dashboards to deliver that knowledge to diverse stakeholders ...
A forecast by the top minds in Application Performance Management (APM) today, the annual list of APM Predictions is the most popular post on APMdigest, viewed by tens of thousands of people in the APM community around the world every year. Industry experts – from analysts and consultants to users and the top vendors – offer thoughtful, insightful, and sometimes controversial predictions on how APM will evolve and impact business in 2015. The first 5 predictions cover some of the hottest buzzwords in IT, including user experience, mobile first, borderless enterprise, holistic view and the soon-to-be-ubiquitous Internet of Things ...
End user experience monitoring goes hand in hand with Application Performance Management (APM). It seems that every APM vendor includes End User Experience Monitoring as part of its solution. Yet, as enterprise IT Ops teams implement these solutions, they can still find themselves blind to what their workforce users are actually experiencing as they use the broad range of business critical applications in the enterprise portfolio. Explaining this conflict requires a deeper look at what other vendors classify as end user experience monitoring. Four different approaches commonly found in the market solve some of the problem some of the time, but each has important limitations to be aware of ...
During APMdigest's exclusive interview last month, John Rakowski, Forrester Analyst & Advisor Serving Infrastructure & Operations Professionals, outlined 10 must-have capabilities to look for when you are purchasing an APM solution. Not included with the rest of the interview, here is the list published for the first time ...
APMdigest asked experts from across the APM industry for their opinions on how to best prepare for the challenges of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the Holiday Shopping Season. The final set of six technologies presented here includes tools to manage availability, capacity and resources ...
APMdigest asked experts from across the APM industry for their opinions on how to best prepare for the challenges of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the Holiday Shopping Season. The second set of six technologies presented here includes tools for network operations and development ...
This is the time of year when stores start to decorate with holly and tinsel, snowflakes and twinkling lights, as they prepare for the biggest revenue-generating season of the year. While online sales organizations do not need to hang any mistletoe, they should be preparing for what is becoming – more and more each year – their biggest sales season as well. As e-commerce represents a greater percentage of any company's revenue, the challenge to meet customer needs online is more important to the company's success each year. With this in mind, APMdigest asked experts from across the APM industry for their opinions on how to best prepare for the challenges of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the Holiday Shopping Season. The first six technologies presented here start out with mainstream APM capabilities that are essential to e-commerce success ...
With Black Friday and Cyber Monday coming up, online retailers need to start preparing for an increased volume of website visitors and transactions. And, with more and more people turning to the Internet each year to purchase their goods and services, e-tailers must brace themselves for the biggest avalanche yet of online holiday shoppers. Remember the Target, Kohl’s and Walmart website crashes of holiday seasons past? Based on those incidents, e-tailers know they must ensure that downtime, performance issues or denial-of-service attacks don’t impact their service on those initial major holiday shopping days, and well into the holiday season, as that could hurt their bottom line or their business reputation ...
Gartner released the 2014 Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring report, by Research VPs Jonah Kowall and Will Cappelli ...
Gartner, Inc. said advanced analytics is a top business priority, fueled by the need to make advanced analysis accessible to more users and broaden the insight into the business. IT and business leaders must expand their efforts to move their organizations from using only traditional BI that addresses descriptive analysis (what happened) to advanced analytics, which complements by answering "why", "what will happen" and "how we can address it" ...
According to eMarketer, as of 2014 Americans consume more media using mobile devices than laptops and desktops combined. This shift in consumer behavior is also occurring within corporations, as employees increasingly rely on mobile devices for their work. With such a surge in mobile usage there is a growing need for corporations to ensure that their mobile experience is high quality and not broken. Since 86% of mobile experiences occur within apps and not mobile browsers, focusing on improving app performance has a larger impact on mobile quality. The following are 4 key differences that companies monitoring their server (and website) performance should consider when selecting a mobile app performance monitoring solution ...
What is the best APM (Application Performance Management) solution out there in the market today? Unfortunately that question cannot be answered until your requirements are clearly defined. However, when shopping for an APM solution, there are certain qualities that you must consider in order to ensure maximum ROI (Return on Investment). The following are 8 qualities you must look for in an APM solution if your enterprise is primarily Java based ...
Moving your businesses' infrastructure, including the application layer and associated APIs, to the cloud, is a daunting task given today's plethora of digital tools available and heightened concerns of data protection, application performance and data integrity. One of the most conveniently accessible options is Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery via cloud computing, which offers businesses a reliable, cost-effective way to manage and track company IT consumption without the burden of managing physical servers. But leveraging the public cloud introduces inherent challenges in terms of quality of application delivery and performance because a company's data now traverses through a series of externally maintained systems and security controls. Accordingly, enterprises looking to move to a SaaS app-delivery cloud model should consider the following ...
The team behind APMdigest has launched a companion site called the APM Buyers Guide at apmbuyersguide.com
The APM Buyers Guide is a directory of the vendors and their product offerings in the Application Performance Management (APM) market, as well as related markets including Business Service Management (BSM), End User Experience Management (EUEM), IT Operations Analytics (ITOA), Log Analysis, Performance and Availability Monitoring, Network Performance Management (NPM), and Application Testing. The purpose of the site is to present the many vendors in these technology spaces, clarify which vendors offer which product types and capabilities, and showcase the featured vendors and their products ...
The traditional methods used to define and develop desktop applications will not work with mobile application development (AD), according to Gartner, Inc. Gartner said that as demand from business units in enterprises puts increasing pressure on IT organizations to deliver large numbers of mobile applications, AD teams will have to to employ practices that are different from traditional AD ...
There are many components that need to be considered prior to launching an app to ensure a successful user experience. A Dev/Test team's worst nightmare is to launch an app they spent hours, days, weeks, and months to build, only to receive reports of bugs that ruin the user's experience. The mobile app market is extremely competitive, with Gartner citing the number of app downloads reaching nearly 269 billion by 2017. With so many options, only apps that work will survive. If an app fails to meet the user's expectations due to poor functionality, availability or reliability, abandonment will most likely occur. So, how does a mobile Dev/Test team prevent app failure from the beginning? ...
We now live in the age of the consumer, and the ability to engage with companies wherever, whenever is expected by all. Well-performing mobile apps are becoming synonymous with quality customer service, and companies are increasingly distinguished by the various mobile applications they can (or cannot) provide for their customers. How do small businesses, which often lack large budgets to properly monitor and manage a myriad of different consumer-facing apps, compete with larger competitors? By tapping into APM capabilities via the cloud, smaller companies can implement advanced app management strategies without an extensive physical IT infrastructure - and the money required to manage it. Here's a look into how APM Software-as-a-Service provides SMBs with the tools needed to evolve into the mobile businesses customers are demanding ...
Nearly 90 percent surveyed stopped using an app due to poor performance, according to The App Attention Span study, conducted by AppDynamics in partnership with the Institute of Management Studies (IMS) at Goldsmiths, University of London. The App Attention Span investigated the impact of the increasing importance and use of mobile devices on aspects of people’s behavior, and the corresponding business implications. It reveals that, as people’s attention spans for poor-performing apps shorten, the stakes are high for any business that depends on its website or mobile app ...
The wireless landscape has changed dramatically in a very short period of time. Not only is there greater capacity demand, but wireless networks themselves have become infinitely more complex because of growing interconnectedness, new technology innovations, and shifting patterns of user activity. All of these factors mean that capacity planning models also have to change. There are more variables to monitor and more scenarios to consider. At the same time, the consequences of not being able to accurately predict bandwidth demand loom larger than ever. Capacity planning has to be a strategic priority, and capacity planning models have to reflect the new realities of network evolution in 2014 ...
APMdigest rounds out the list with some final thoughts on the many valuable tools available – beyond what is technically categorized as APM – to support the goals of improving application performance and business service ...
