Application Performance Management Enables DevOps ROI
May 01, 2015

Gabriel Lowy
TechTonics

More organizations are discovering the efficiencies of adopting DevOps practices for application lifecycle management. As they do, they realize that Application Performance Management (APM) enables DevOps ROI (return on investment).

Large enterprises typically run multi-tiered applications across a variety of systems and platforms. These can range from in-house mainframes to external clouds. With the accelerating usage of cloud-based apps, the complexity of integrating these applications is a challenge for even the most sophisticated IT teams.

Greater agility is the underlying business case for a DevOps approach. Leveraging increased automation, DevOps applies agile and lean practices throughout the software lifecycle. It allows IT to launch higher quality applications and deploy them faster than in the past.

The Key to Better Performing Applications

APM is integral to helping companies realize ROI on their DevOps initiatives. By moving performance analytics forward in the development lifecycle, DevOps teams can discover dependencies to learn how an application will perform once it goes “live”. Metrics derived from continuous transaction monitoring act as an early warning system for operational or quality issues – before the application is released into production. These metrics can then be used to establish key performance indicators (KPIs) against which the production environment can be measured.

Rather than waiting for post-production performance data to analyze what went wrong, the DevOps team can build performance analytics models that can anticipate operational and quality problems before the delivery phase. As production metrics more consistently adhere to KPIs, application performance – and user experience – improves.

Sharing the data with line of business teams at this stage accelerates the feedback loop from the various application stakeholders. These can include internal users, customers and partners. This feedback is essential for all constituents to make changes about what capabilities the application should have. The DevOps team can then make adjustments faster and with less stress while maintaining focus on optimizing the user experience.

Closer collaboration between development, operations and quality assurance teams can alleviate other issues as well. Silos of performance data held by different teams – infrastructure, server, network, virtualization or application – can be integrated into a higher-level view. As stand-alone data sets, their benefits are diluted by their incompatibility. This is a common problem with point solutions. While each may be separately indicating good application performance, the user experience may still be poor.

Related to this silo issue is that each of these solutions comes with its own console. Their incompatibility can generate many false positives. IT teams will often get frustrated and eventually ignore most of the alerts they receive.

Meanwhile, performance continues to suffer. Internal users abandon the application, eroding productivity. Customers grow frustrated and leave the site, costing revenue and reputational damage.

Benefits of an Integrated APM Platform

This data only begins to yield meaningful insights when it’s integrated into a unified strategic framework. A unified platform approach to assuring user experience allows performance metrics from the DevOps process to be correlated with post-production data.

Information about how users engage with an application and the feedback those users provide about their experience are most valuable for the DevOps team. These include metrics such as the number of tickets generated due to user complaints, adds, drops or changes that occur in the normal course of business, or customer comments in app stores or on social media.

A unified platform with advanced performance analytics provides IT teams with operational intelligence about user experience at the point of engagement. They allow triage techniques to pinpoint the root cause of performance issues in real time to accelerate troubleshooting and mean time to repair (MTTR). The “R” in MTTR really refers to “reliability”. All of this performance data then cycles back to the DevOps team so that processes can be refined to improve agility.

A unified APM platform that enhances user experience directly correlates to the enterprise product life cycle. Companies can realize faster time to value by accelerating product development and launches. User experience that consistently meets or exceeds customer expectations builds loyalty and strengthens competitiveness. ROI improves through reduced costs, enhanced productivity and new revenue streams. Better application performance also mitigates risks, such as uncompleted transactions, reputational damage or compliance violations.

Gabriel Lowy is the founder of TechTonics Advisors, a research-first investor relations consultancy that helps technology companies maximize value for all stakeholders by bridging vision, strategy, product portfolio and markets with analysts and investors
Share this

Industry News

March 18, 2024

Kubiya.ai announces the launch of its DevOps Digital Agents.

March 18, 2024

Aviatrix® introduced Aviatrix Distributed Cloud Firewall for Kubernetes, a distributed cloud networking and network security solution for containerized enterprise applications and workloads.

March 18, 2024

Stride announces the general availability of Stride Conductor, its new autonomous coding product that transforms the software development landscape.

March 14, 2024

CircleCI unveiled CircleCI releases, which enables developers to automate the release orchestration process directly from the CircleCI UI.

March 13, 2024

Fermyon™ Technologies announces Fermyon Platform for Kubernetes, a WebAssembly platform for Kubernetes.

March 13, 2024

Akuity announced a new offer targeted at Enterprises and businesses where security and compliance are key.

March 13, 2024

New Relic launched new capabilities for New Relic IAST (Interactive Application Security Testing), including proof-of-exploit reporting for application security testing.

March 12, 2024

OutSystems announced AI Agent Builder, a new solution in the OutSystems Developer Cloud platform that makes it easy for IT leaders to incorporate generative AI (GenAI) powered applications into their digital transformation strategy, as well as govern the use of AI to ensure standardization and security.

March 12, 2024

Mirantis announced significant updates to Lens Desktop that makes working with Kubernetes easier by simplifying operations, improving efficiency, and increasing productivity. Lens 2024 Early Access is now available to Lens users.

March 12, 2024

Codezero announced a $3.5 million seed-funding round led by Ballistic Ventures, the venture capital firm dedicated exclusively to funding entrepreneurs and innovations in cybersecurity.

March 11, 2024

Prismatic launched a code-native integration building experience.

March 07, 2024

Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. announced its Check Point Infinity Platform has been ranked as the #1 Zero Trust Platform in the latest Miercom Zero Trust Platform Assessment.

March 07, 2024

Tricentis announced the launch and availability of SAP Test Automation by Tricentis as an SAP Solution Extension.

March 07, 2024

Netlify announced the general availability of the AI-enabled deploy assist.

March 07, 2024

DataStax announced a new integration with Airbyte that simplifies the process of building production-ready GenAI applications with structured and unstructured data.