APM

October 23, 2015

Performance Testing (aka synthetic testing) and APM (Application Performance Management and monitoring solutions) are often regarded as two competing solutions, as if one were an alternative to the other. They are actually perfect complementary tools to achieve optimal performance for your application. Whether you develop web applications, SaaS products or mobile apps, you‘ll find both approaches to be absolutely necessary in your software operations. Here, I explain why ...

October 15, 2015

Because good things come to those who refuse to wait! Your customers don’t want to wait as your website takes more than a blink of an eye to load. They won’t forgive you for slower websites or ill-functional apps ...

October 13, 2015

Let's go back in time. Think of when your applications used to run from a single server and when the monolithic enterprise management software approach was more than enough to effectively monitor them. I know those days may have been just 10 years ago, but given the fast pace of the tech industry, those are officially our dark ages. Now, let's fast-forward to the present application economy in which your customers are demanding higher quality applications faster than ever before. To meet these new expectations, the infrastructure of the application has evolved; inevitably becoming more sophisticated and ultimately more complex ...

October 09, 2015

It probably seems obvious to you that Application Performance Management (APM) is important, but you will likely need to answer the question of APM importance to someone like your boss or the company CFO that wants to know why she must pay for it. In order to qualify the importance of APM, let's consider the alternatives to adopting an APM solution and assess the impact in terms of resolution effort and elapsed downtime ...

October 07, 2015

Legacy performance management solutions were architected for smaller, less-complex and static computing environments that did not change much from year-to-year. When all an IT team had to worry about was measuring infrastructure availability and utilization these tools were sufficient. But time has passed them by ...

September 29, 2015

Gabriel Lowy, Founder of Tech-Tonics, looks at Application Performance Management (APM) from the investor's perspective ...

September 17, 2015

Companies today waste too much time on fragmented tool functionality. The infographic below, based on an Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) study, shows the current state of monitoring tool use ...

September 01, 2015

With the inevitable zombie apocalypse, having the right strategies to combat the plague will be essential. Turns out that trouble-shooting application performance isn’t much different. As any good zombie fighter will tell you, in a pandemic that threatens to consume all humanity, it’ll be important to find the first person infected – called “patient zero”. Knowing that sucker's history can help determine how and when the infection started, and with a bit of luck, a way to stop it. You might scoff, but there are many parallels between this and the way we manage application performance. Ok, perhaps not on a World War Z scale, but still troublesome enough to bite your business where it hurts most ...

August 31, 2015

In Part 3 of a three-part interview, AppDynamics talks about Unified Monitoring, analytics and the AppDynamics Summer 15 release ...

August 28, 2015

In Part 2 of a three-part interview, AppDynamics talks about Application Performance Management for cloud and mobile ...

August 27, 2015

In Part 1 of a three-part interview, AppDynamics talks about Application Performance Management, monitoring and the 2015 APM Tools Survey, conducted by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

August 26, 2015

For the business, application performance is only relevant if it correlates to meaningful user experiences and conversion metrics. The most common challenge hindering companies from realizing the full promise of application performance solutions has been the lack of a common language, and business-relevant metrics to measure monitor and set targets for customer experiences. The organizational divisions that separate development, IT operations and business teams have led to varied and disparate perspectives on end-user experience, how performance impacts business, and the level of investments needed to consistently excel. To really move beyond the traditional APM mindset, where performance is seen as a technical problem, marketing and business leaders across global industries are in need of new approach to monitoring. An approach that starts and end with the user experience ...

August 10, 2015

EMA estimates that enterprise customers with cloud-based deployments are running an average of 20% of their workloads over public and/or private cloud. The problem is that cloud deployments often experience performance issues. Since traditional testing methods do not always catch these issues prior to deployment, optimization has become a requirement ...

August 06, 2015

In a recent interview, an IT operations director told us, “We frankly have too many tools, and many of them weren’t performing to our expectations.” If you are an enterprise ops leader managing complex applications, you can probably relate to that statement. At AppDynamics, we call this “Franken-monitoring,” a situation characterized by many, usually too many, siloed tools — for application, server, database, end-user client, etc. — that provide varying levels of disparate visibility into IT applications. We commissioned analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) to get to the bottom of this. In the 2015 APM Tools Survey, EMA found that a majority of surveyed enterprises have 11 or more commercial tools in their arsenal to manage application performance ...

August 03, 2015

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has discovered that application performance data is extremely valuable when enterprises apply big data analytics to IT monitoring data, and it might be helping in the area where you least expect – Infrastructure capacity planning ...

July 23, 2015

Mobile apps are serious business, and mobile app performance is key. With this in mind, APMdigest asked industry experts – from analysts and consultants to the top vendors – to recommend the best ways to ensure mobile app performance. Part 3 of the list covers the production side including Application Performance Management, monitoring and more ...

July 16, 2015

Mobile apps and websites must be key to success? An app is critical to help you "play" in today’s digital retail market, but having an app alone will not guarantee success. So here are three reasons highlighted in the AppDynamics report An App Is Not Enough which are key for mobile app success ...

July 15, 2015

For today’s always-on consumers, the performance of retail websites and mobile applications is strongly linked to customer satisfaction, loyalty and spend, according to a new study by AppDynamics. The AppDynamics report An App Is Not Enough indicates that consumer expectations of retail websites and mobile apps are evolving in response to the growth of mobile and emerging technologies, with 70 percent of consumers stating that the performance of a mobile app impacts their perception of the retailer ...

July 13, 2015

Your enterprise network — and all the applications running on it — is the foundation for how every single employee gets his or her work done. E-mail, VoIP, CRM, ERP and every other custom or off-the-shelf application runs on your network. In order to provide these applications to end-users, more enterprises are adopting a hybrid enterprise model that incorporates a mix of on-premises and cloud-hosted apps, and of networks comprised of private, public Internet infrastructure. This makes monitoring applications and network performance a lot more challenging, more time-consuming and therefore costlier for IT. A key question you must ask yourself when determining whether you have the necessary visibility into your network and all the applications running on it: Do I know what I need to monitor? ...

June 22, 2015

The "point of delivery", which is where users access composite apps, is the only perspective from which user experience should be evaluated. Thus, the most relevant metric for IT teams is not about infrastructure utilization. Instead, it is at what point of utilization the user experience begins to degrade. This means transaction completion. If transactions do not complete, user experience suffers as does business performance ...

June 17, 2015

Dynatrace’s Chief Marketing Officer Nicolas Robbe talks about Application Performance Management (APM), and the company’s ongoing business transformation and future outlook – including the merger with Keynote announced today ...

June 09, 2015

The development of new and more complex business technologies happens so quickly now that they are starting to outpace the rate at which IT organizations can effectively monitor the entire IT infrastructure and react to problems. This is particularly true as more enterprises adopt a hybrid model with some resources managed in the data center and some in cloud or SaaS-based environments. Simultaneously, IT organizations have become increasingly siloed as different personnel develop skillsets specific to different pieces of the IT infrastructure, such as database management, the network, information security, etc. As a result, the “war room” – where IT personnel gather to diagnose and fix a problem – more often than not devolves into a session of finger pointing and delays. Remedying this situation demands a new approach to managing performance that enables IT to become more proactive instead of reactive, and more collaborative instead of siloed ...

June 05, 2015

The PADS (Performance Analytics and Decision Support) Framework is a more strategic approach to linking next-generation performance management and big data analytics technologies. It establishes best practices for assuring user experience, reducing risk and improving decision making. The Framework provides real-time intelligence that enables companies to build customer satisfaction and loyalty, and improve operational efficiency ...

May 29, 2015

IT Central Station — leading review site used by enterprise tech professionals to research APM and other solutions in order to make informed buying decisions — is offering a free report on APMdigest.

May 18, 2015

It is easy to feel that so called "second generation" APM tooling rules the world. And for good reason, many would argue – certainly the positive disruptive effects of support for highly distributed / Service Orientated architectures, and the requirements of many fast moving businesses to support a plethora of different technologies are a powerful dynamic. That leaves aside the undoubted advantages of comprehensive traffic screening (as opposed to "hard" sampling), ease of installation and commissioning (relative in some cases), user accessibility, flexible reporting and tighter productive association between IT and business – in short, empowering the DevOps and PerfOps revolution. So, modern APM is certainly well attuned to the requirements of current business. What's not to like? Could these technologies have an Achilles heel? ...

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