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APM - It's All About the Speed

Jim Swepson

We have all been aware of the importance of managing performance for many years and traditionally the main focus has been on the availability of our internal systems (systems/server application management). APM on the other hand is helping companies to gain a good understanding of their application performance and a key aspect of this is visibility on how applications perform across all types of networks.

Availability has become, over the past decade, an intrinsic requirement in all application performance whether it is internal or external applications. We don’t think about it quite so much, but what is becoming increasingly essential is speed.

Ten years ago when I came into the office I would switch on my PC and whilst waiting for it to boot up, I had sufficient time to go to the kitchen and make a drink, then come back and my PC would be ready. That was then – this is now: Today we turn on our laptops, desktops and tablets and expect them to work almost instantaneously.

This is becoming a typical expectation in today's world where something might be available, but if it isn't fast enough then we are no longer willing to wait. We might feel irritation or even go elsewhere.

This is where APM scores! It is no longer about availability. In the past, for example, an SLA focused on availability. But in these modern times, we are looking at speed as in important component of an SLA. There is an increased focus on the end-user experience and they want an instantaneous response! It needs to be FAST! And it needs to be now!

So what are some of the issues that can make an application perform slowly:

- Long download times on start-up

- Congestion/contention

- Limited bandwidth

- Bad link

- Jitter, loss and latency

A few months back I was working with a company that had virtualized their IT environment, consolidating all their servers from around Europe to the UK. At the same time, they had a new customer facing application that was crucial to how they did business. It wasn't long before they discovered that a 750K xml file was being loaded to every client PC at start-up and this took an average of 7.5s to serve. Users were not happy! With the help of an Application Performance Management solution, the organization was able to ascertain what the problem was and get it fixed. Without the use of an APM tool, they would have had a much tougher time trying to figure out a cost-effective solution.

I recently looked on a website that contained some interesting website stats, and if they are to be believed, website users have a very small window of around 2 seconds before going elsewhere! Now this is probably not the case within IT, we are a bit more patient, but still, it begs the thought: When is available, but slow, no longer good enough?

Jim Swepson is Pre-sales Technologist at Itrinegy.

Related Links:

www.itrinegy.com

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APM - It's All About the Speed

Jim Swepson

We have all been aware of the importance of managing performance for many years and traditionally the main focus has been on the availability of our internal systems (systems/server application management). APM on the other hand is helping companies to gain a good understanding of their application performance and a key aspect of this is visibility on how applications perform across all types of networks.

Availability has become, over the past decade, an intrinsic requirement in all application performance whether it is internal or external applications. We don’t think about it quite so much, but what is becoming increasingly essential is speed.

Ten years ago when I came into the office I would switch on my PC and whilst waiting for it to boot up, I had sufficient time to go to the kitchen and make a drink, then come back and my PC would be ready. That was then – this is now: Today we turn on our laptops, desktops and tablets and expect them to work almost instantaneously.

This is becoming a typical expectation in today's world where something might be available, but if it isn't fast enough then we are no longer willing to wait. We might feel irritation or even go elsewhere.

This is where APM scores! It is no longer about availability. In the past, for example, an SLA focused on availability. But in these modern times, we are looking at speed as in important component of an SLA. There is an increased focus on the end-user experience and they want an instantaneous response! It needs to be FAST! And it needs to be now!

So what are some of the issues that can make an application perform slowly:

- Long download times on start-up

- Congestion/contention

- Limited bandwidth

- Bad link

- Jitter, loss and latency

A few months back I was working with a company that had virtualized their IT environment, consolidating all their servers from around Europe to the UK. At the same time, they had a new customer facing application that was crucial to how they did business. It wasn't long before they discovered that a 750K xml file was being loaded to every client PC at start-up and this took an average of 7.5s to serve. Users were not happy! With the help of an Application Performance Management solution, the organization was able to ascertain what the problem was and get it fixed. Without the use of an APM tool, they would have had a much tougher time trying to figure out a cost-effective solution.

I recently looked on a website that contained some interesting website stats, and if they are to be believed, website users have a very small window of around 2 seconds before going elsewhere! Now this is probably not the case within IT, we are a bit more patient, but still, it begs the thought: When is available, but slow, no longer good enough?

Jim Swepson is Pre-sales Technologist at Itrinegy.

Related Links:

www.itrinegy.com

How Loading Time Affects Your Bottom Line

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...