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APM Tools and High-Availability Clusters: A Powerful Combination for Network Resiliency

Cassius Rhue
SIOS Technology

Network resilience, defined as the ability of a network to maintain connectivity and functional continuity in the event of disruption, is an operational imperative for technology dependent enterprises. Recent analysis by Siemens found that an hour of downtime can run into the millions, disrupting production, violating service level agreements (SLAs), preventing transactions, and running up large bills for staff overtime and outside consultants to restore service, run post-mortem analyses, and pay steep fines.

For some industries, like financial services, the effects of poor network resilience can be contagious. Global economies depend on financial services organizations with reliable, efficient IT infrastructure to facilitate trillions of dollars of commercial transactions each year, so the perception of network fragility can upset entire markets. That's why banking regulators like the Basel Committee and the US Federal Reserve require high standards for achieving network resilience. Likewise, because of their critical role in public safety, organizations operating in industries like healthcare, critical infrastructure, and telecommunications all have mandates to adopt practices designed to achieve high levels of network resilience.

Resilient Organizations Are Smart Organizations

IT infrastructure (on-premises, cloud, or hybrid) is becoming larger and more complex. IT management tools need data to drive better decision making and more process automation to complement manual intervention by IT staff. That is why smart organizations invest in the systems and strategies needed to make their IT infrastructure more resilient in the event of disruption, and why many are turning to application performance monitoring (APM) in conjunction with high availability (HA) clusters.

APM tools are well-positioned as a means of feeding better data into the platforms enterprises use to monitor and manage IT infrastructure. Data provided by APM provides a more precise understanding of system health, enabling IT management to establish more precise parameters for making decisions with the confidence of good, timely data. High availability clusters are either hardware (SAN-based clusters) or software (SANless clusters) that support seamless failover of services to backup resources in the event of an incident.

A Powerful Combination

The combination of APM and HA makes it easier for enterprises to improve network resiliency by supporting and injecting better decision making and the use of automation to enable seamless failover, predictive analytics, self-healing, and other capabilities consistent with maximizing network performance, uptime, and operational resilience. When used in a multi-cloud environment, services can failover to the organization's secondary cloud provider, which is a major advantage when an outage affects a cloud services provider. And in a multi-cloud environment resilience is further boosted by distributing workloads between clouds and eliminating a single source of failure.

As some enterprises evolve toward autonomous IT, data provided by APM provides a more precise understanding of system health, enabling IT management to establish more precise parameters for making decisions with confidence. This can help avoid an unnecessary dilemma in cases when the consequences of intervening to shut down one system, even if it is to switch to a backup system, could cost thousands of dollars.

Data-Based Decision Making

Consider a situation where the person responsible for a critical decision to failover to avoid a possible incident calculates that it may cost the organization more than $50,000 to manually intervene, even if the cost of waiting for an actual, catastrophic crash might be considerably higher. In that case, the decision maker may feel it would be better to blame something else rather than be questioned for making a gut decision or a good-faith judgment call. Better data means those involved have a clearer understanding of the situation and if they have to manually intervene, they can do so with hard evidence to justify their decision.

Here's where the one-two punch of APM tools and HA clusters helps by making it easier to maintain service continuity even when poor system performance, an incident, or a disaster threatens to disrupt operations. By giving IT managers a clear understanding of the health of the network and its components, operators can see exactly what's happening and take measures in advance of an incident or crisis to avert downtime. When failover is required, the reasoning is supported by data within the context of parameters established dictated by the organization's risk tolerance. Gray areas are eliminated.

Consider the Advantages

When integrated with an enterprise's APM tools, HA clusters provide network resilience by ensuring failover of mission-critical services and application is automatic and seamless, minimizing delays and errors that can occur during manual intervention and ensuring operations continue until the incident is resolved. Today, more organizations are opting for SANless clusters because they function the same as traditional SAN clusters but at a lower cost and without taxing network resources like SAN-based hardware. SANless clusters have the flexibility to work in on-premises, cloud, or hybrid infrastructure, and enable node configurations that support geographically distributed data centers, which is important for disaster planning.

Whether your organization operates in an industry where network resilience is mandated, or if you are looking for a way to differentiate by improving reliability, consider the advantages of teaming your APM solution with high availability clusters. Together they offer a smart, simple, and cost-effective way to keep pace with expectations for network resiliency.

Cassius Rhue is VP of Customer Experience at SIOS Technology

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APM Tools and High-Availability Clusters: A Powerful Combination for Network Resiliency

Cassius Rhue
SIOS Technology

Network resilience, defined as the ability of a network to maintain connectivity and functional continuity in the event of disruption, is an operational imperative for technology dependent enterprises. Recent analysis by Siemens found that an hour of downtime can run into the millions, disrupting production, violating service level agreements (SLAs), preventing transactions, and running up large bills for staff overtime and outside consultants to restore service, run post-mortem analyses, and pay steep fines.

For some industries, like financial services, the effects of poor network resilience can be contagious. Global economies depend on financial services organizations with reliable, efficient IT infrastructure to facilitate trillions of dollars of commercial transactions each year, so the perception of network fragility can upset entire markets. That's why banking regulators like the Basel Committee and the US Federal Reserve require high standards for achieving network resilience. Likewise, because of their critical role in public safety, organizations operating in industries like healthcare, critical infrastructure, and telecommunications all have mandates to adopt practices designed to achieve high levels of network resilience.

Resilient Organizations Are Smart Organizations

IT infrastructure (on-premises, cloud, or hybrid) is becoming larger and more complex. IT management tools need data to drive better decision making and more process automation to complement manual intervention by IT staff. That is why smart organizations invest in the systems and strategies needed to make their IT infrastructure more resilient in the event of disruption, and why many are turning to application performance monitoring (APM) in conjunction with high availability (HA) clusters.

APM tools are well-positioned as a means of feeding better data into the platforms enterprises use to monitor and manage IT infrastructure. Data provided by APM provides a more precise understanding of system health, enabling IT management to establish more precise parameters for making decisions with the confidence of good, timely data. High availability clusters are either hardware (SAN-based clusters) or software (SANless clusters) that support seamless failover of services to backup resources in the event of an incident.

A Powerful Combination

The combination of APM and HA makes it easier for enterprises to improve network resiliency by supporting and injecting better decision making and the use of automation to enable seamless failover, predictive analytics, self-healing, and other capabilities consistent with maximizing network performance, uptime, and operational resilience. When used in a multi-cloud environment, services can failover to the organization's secondary cloud provider, which is a major advantage when an outage affects a cloud services provider. And in a multi-cloud environment resilience is further boosted by distributing workloads between clouds and eliminating a single source of failure.

As some enterprises evolve toward autonomous IT, data provided by APM provides a more precise understanding of system health, enabling IT management to establish more precise parameters for making decisions with confidence. This can help avoid an unnecessary dilemma in cases when the consequences of intervening to shut down one system, even if it is to switch to a backup system, could cost thousands of dollars.

Data-Based Decision Making

Consider a situation where the person responsible for a critical decision to failover to avoid a possible incident calculates that it may cost the organization more than $50,000 to manually intervene, even if the cost of waiting for an actual, catastrophic crash might be considerably higher. In that case, the decision maker may feel it would be better to blame something else rather than be questioned for making a gut decision or a good-faith judgment call. Better data means those involved have a clearer understanding of the situation and if they have to manually intervene, they can do so with hard evidence to justify their decision.

Here's where the one-two punch of APM tools and HA clusters helps by making it easier to maintain service continuity even when poor system performance, an incident, or a disaster threatens to disrupt operations. By giving IT managers a clear understanding of the health of the network and its components, operators can see exactly what's happening and take measures in advance of an incident or crisis to avert downtime. When failover is required, the reasoning is supported by data within the context of parameters established dictated by the organization's risk tolerance. Gray areas are eliminated.

Consider the Advantages

When integrated with an enterprise's APM tools, HA clusters provide network resilience by ensuring failover of mission-critical services and application is automatic and seamless, minimizing delays and errors that can occur during manual intervention and ensuring operations continue until the incident is resolved. Today, more organizations are opting for SANless clusters because they function the same as traditional SAN clusters but at a lower cost and without taxing network resources like SAN-based hardware. SANless clusters have the flexibility to work in on-premises, cloud, or hybrid infrastructure, and enable node configurations that support geographically distributed data centers, which is important for disaster planning.

Whether your organization operates in an industry where network resilience is mandated, or if you are looking for a way to differentiate by improving reliability, consider the advantages of teaming your APM solution with high availability clusters. Together they offer a smart, simple, and cost-effective way to keep pace with expectations for network resiliency.

Cassius Rhue is VP of Customer Experience at SIOS Technology

Hot Topics

The Latest

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

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 ...