Skip to main content

APM for Development - Unified Monitoring for IT Ops

Scott Hollis

Ensuring application performance is a never ending task that involves multiple products, features and best practices. There is no one process, feature, or product that does everything. A good place to start is pre-production and production monitoring with both an Application Performance Management (APM) tool and a Unified Monitoring tool.

The APM tool will trace/instrument your application and application server activity and often the end user experience via synthetic transactions. The development team and DevOps folks need this.

The Unified Monitoring tool will monitor the supporting infrastructure. The IT Ops team needs this. DevOps likes it too because it helps make IT Ops more effective, which in turn helps assure application delivery.

More Cost Effective

APM tools do not specialize in infrastructure monitoring like unified monitoring solutions do, and unified monitoring solutions do not provide application monitoring depth and diagnostics like the APM tools do. And on top of that, the different audiences need different information.

The best approach is to buy APM for the most critical applications. Most organizations use APM for 10% - 15% of their applications. It is too expensive to buy it for everything. Then for the second tier applications that need some monitoring, they use the unified monitoring solution. It is much less expensive and if you select one with synthetic transaction capability you can get "good enough" end user experience monitoring to know whether or not the application is performing well or not.

Service-Centric is Key

When it comes to unified monitoring, it is important to understand that most unified monitoring vendors provide endpoint monitoring. With endpoint monitoring alone, it is impossible to provide highly accurate root-cause isolation. And they don't identify which service, or application, is impacted. And they can't tell you the extent of the impact. Is it just at risk without impacting application delivery yet OR is it down OR is it somewhere in between?

Be sure the unified monitoring vendor is service-centric and models relationships between components, and that it identifies root-cause; the service or application impacted; and the extent of the impact. This can save hours when there is an outage.

Better yet, by identifying when services are at risk, this can help you to proactively identify and address issues before services/application delivery is impacted.

Scott Hollis is Director of Product Marketing for Zenoss.

Hot Topics

The Latest

E-commerce is set to skyrocket with a 9% rise over the next few years ... To thrive in this competitive environment, retailers must identify digital resilience as their top priority. In a world where savvy shoppers expect 24/7 access to online deals and experiences, any unexpected downtime to digital services can lead to significant financial losses, damage to brand reputation, abandoned carts with designer shoes, and additional issues ...

Efficiency is a highly-desirable objective in business ... We're seeing this scenario play out in enterprises around the world as they continue to struggle with infrastructures and remote work models with an eye toward operational efficiencies. In contrast to that goal, a recent Broadcom survey of global IT and network professionals found widespread adoption of these strategies is making the network more complex and hampering observability, leading to uptime, performance and security issues. Let's look more closely at these challenges ...

Image
Broadcom

The 2025 Catchpoint SRE Report dives into the forces transforming the SRE landscape, exploring both the challenges and opportunities ahead. Let's break down the key findings and what they mean for SRE professionals and the businesses relying on them ...

Image
Catchpoint

The pressure on IT teams has never been greater. As data environments grow increasingly complex, resource shortages are emerging as a major obstacle for IT leaders striving to meet the demands of modern infrastructure management ... According to DataStrike's newly released 2025 Data Infrastructure Survey Report, more than half (54%) of IT leaders cite resource limitations as a top challenge, highlighting a growing trend toward outsourcing as a solution ...

Image
Datastrike

Gartner revealed its top strategic predictions for 2025 and beyond. Gartner's top predictions explore how generative AI (GenAI) is affecting areas where most would assume only humans can have lasting impact ...

The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating across the telecoms industry, with 88% of fixed broadband service providers now investigating or trialing AI automation to enhance their fixed broadband services, according to new research from Incognito Software Systems and Omdia ...

 

AWS is a cloud-based computing platform known for its reliability, scalability, and flexibility. However, as helpful as its comprehensive infrastructure is, disparate elements and numerous siloed components make it difficult for admins to visualize the cloud performance in detail. It requires meticulous monitoring techniques and deep visibility to understand cloud performance and analyze operational efficiency in detail to ensure seamless cloud operations ...

Imagine a future where software, once a complex obstacle, becomes a natural extension of daily workflow — an intuitive, seamless experience that maximizes productivity and efficiency. This future is no longer a distant vision but a reality being crafted by the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence ...

Enterprise data sprawl already challenges companies' ability to protect and back up their data. Much of this information is never fully secured, leaving organizations vulnerable. Now, as GenAI platforms emerge as yet another environment where enterprise data is consumed, transformed, and created, this fragmentation is set to intensify ...

Image
Crashplan

OpenTelemetry (OTel) has revolutionized the way we approach observability by standardizing the collection of telemetry data ... Here are five myths — and truths — to help elevate your OTel integration by harnessing the untapped power of logs ...

APM for Development - Unified Monitoring for IT Ops

Scott Hollis

Ensuring application performance is a never ending task that involves multiple products, features and best practices. There is no one process, feature, or product that does everything. A good place to start is pre-production and production monitoring with both an Application Performance Management (APM) tool and a Unified Monitoring tool.

The APM tool will trace/instrument your application and application server activity and often the end user experience via synthetic transactions. The development team and DevOps folks need this.

The Unified Monitoring tool will monitor the supporting infrastructure. The IT Ops team needs this. DevOps likes it too because it helps make IT Ops more effective, which in turn helps assure application delivery.

More Cost Effective

APM tools do not specialize in infrastructure monitoring like unified monitoring solutions do, and unified monitoring solutions do not provide application monitoring depth and diagnostics like the APM tools do. And on top of that, the different audiences need different information.

The best approach is to buy APM for the most critical applications. Most organizations use APM for 10% - 15% of their applications. It is too expensive to buy it for everything. Then for the second tier applications that need some monitoring, they use the unified monitoring solution. It is much less expensive and if you select one with synthetic transaction capability you can get "good enough" end user experience monitoring to know whether or not the application is performing well or not.

Service-Centric is Key

When it comes to unified monitoring, it is important to understand that most unified monitoring vendors provide endpoint monitoring. With endpoint monitoring alone, it is impossible to provide highly accurate root-cause isolation. And they don't identify which service, or application, is impacted. And they can't tell you the extent of the impact. Is it just at risk without impacting application delivery yet OR is it down OR is it somewhere in between?

Be sure the unified monitoring vendor is service-centric and models relationships between components, and that it identifies root-cause; the service or application impacted; and the extent of the impact. This can save hours when there is an outage.

Better yet, by identifying when services are at risk, this can help you to proactively identify and address issues before services/application delivery is impacted.

Scott Hollis is Director of Product Marketing for Zenoss.

Hot Topics

The Latest

E-commerce is set to skyrocket with a 9% rise over the next few years ... To thrive in this competitive environment, retailers must identify digital resilience as their top priority. In a world where savvy shoppers expect 24/7 access to online deals and experiences, any unexpected downtime to digital services can lead to significant financial losses, damage to brand reputation, abandoned carts with designer shoes, and additional issues ...

Efficiency is a highly-desirable objective in business ... We're seeing this scenario play out in enterprises around the world as they continue to struggle with infrastructures and remote work models with an eye toward operational efficiencies. In contrast to that goal, a recent Broadcom survey of global IT and network professionals found widespread adoption of these strategies is making the network more complex and hampering observability, leading to uptime, performance and security issues. Let's look more closely at these challenges ...

Image
Broadcom

The 2025 Catchpoint SRE Report dives into the forces transforming the SRE landscape, exploring both the challenges and opportunities ahead. Let's break down the key findings and what they mean for SRE professionals and the businesses relying on them ...

Image
Catchpoint

The pressure on IT teams has never been greater. As data environments grow increasingly complex, resource shortages are emerging as a major obstacle for IT leaders striving to meet the demands of modern infrastructure management ... According to DataStrike's newly released 2025 Data Infrastructure Survey Report, more than half (54%) of IT leaders cite resource limitations as a top challenge, highlighting a growing trend toward outsourcing as a solution ...

Image
Datastrike

Gartner revealed its top strategic predictions for 2025 and beyond. Gartner's top predictions explore how generative AI (GenAI) is affecting areas where most would assume only humans can have lasting impact ...

The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating across the telecoms industry, with 88% of fixed broadband service providers now investigating or trialing AI automation to enhance their fixed broadband services, according to new research from Incognito Software Systems and Omdia ...

 

AWS is a cloud-based computing platform known for its reliability, scalability, and flexibility. However, as helpful as its comprehensive infrastructure is, disparate elements and numerous siloed components make it difficult for admins to visualize the cloud performance in detail. It requires meticulous monitoring techniques and deep visibility to understand cloud performance and analyze operational efficiency in detail to ensure seamless cloud operations ...

Imagine a future where software, once a complex obstacle, becomes a natural extension of daily workflow — an intuitive, seamless experience that maximizes productivity and efficiency. This future is no longer a distant vision but a reality being crafted by the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence ...

Enterprise data sprawl already challenges companies' ability to protect and back up their data. Much of this information is never fully secured, leaving organizations vulnerable. Now, as GenAI platforms emerge as yet another environment where enterprise data is consumed, transformed, and created, this fragmentation is set to intensify ...

Image
Crashplan

OpenTelemetry (OTel) has revolutionized the way we approach observability by standardizing the collection of telemetry data ... Here are five myths — and truths — to help elevate your OTel integration by harnessing the untapped power of logs ...