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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.

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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

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

An overwhelming majority of IT leaders (95%) believe the upcoming wave of AI-powered digital transformation is set to be the most impactful and intensive seen thus far, according to The Science of Productivity: AI, Adoption, And Employee Experience, a new report from Nexthink ...

Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts ...

In March, New Relic published the State of Observability for Media and Entertainment Report to share insights, data, and analysis into the adoption and business value of observability across the media and entertainment industry. Here are six key takeaways from the report ...

Regardless of their scale, business decisions often take time, effort, and a lot of back-and-forth discussion to reach any sort of actionable conclusion ... Any means of streamlining this process and getting from complex problems to optimal solutions more efficiently and reliably is key. How can organizations optimize their decision-making to save time and reduce excess effort from those involved? ...

As enterprises accelerate their cloud adoption strategies, CIOs are routinely exceeding their cloud budgets — a concern that's about to face additional pressure from an unexpected direction: uncertainty over semiconductor tariffs. The CIO Cloud Trends Survey & Report from Azul reveals the extent continued cloud investment despite cost overruns, and how organizations are attempting to bring spending under control ...

Image
Azul

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...