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Application Performance Management is More Than Application Performance Monitoring

Application Performance Management (APM), as defined by the industry, is focused on monitoring — because you can’t manage what you can’t see. But, there are other functions involved in managing application performance. 

For instance, this month we saw news that Outlook.com’s outage was due to a failed firmware update. Monitoring is a key element of ensuring application performance — however, other functions, such as patch management, are necessary to proactively prevent service failures. Below are a few practical considerations when delving into managing application performance.

Measuring Application Performance — What Should You Care About?

Before you start to monitor anything, you need to understand the expectations from the application’s end-users. This will help you focus on the metrics that really matter and prioritize the type of monitoring solution that is required.

For instance, is up/down monitoring adequate? Is an agentless solution sufficient? Or is something more robust needed to collect log files and so on? It’s your duty to weigh the needs of the business (i.e. what’s the impact if monitoring is not in place?) against the cost of the monitoring solution.

Having the end-user conversation will also help you understand the resource requirements for an application. Oftentimes, applications are deployed with more resources than is actually needed to meet performance objectives.

Time to Measure and Monitor — How Do You Know Application Performance is Out of Whack?

Let’s first answer this question by understanding some of the things that can go wrong:

Resources are constrained. This could happen because there is an influx of demand on the application (more users/customers). Some apps simply use more memory the longer they run. Processes can get out of control. Resource constraints can also occur if resources are shared between applications (e.g. in a virtual environment where too many VMs on the same server, SAN capacity, etc.).
 
Services stop. This can be caused by a fatal exception, etc. These things happen unexpectedly, so it’s good to have monitoring in place to alert you when a service has stopped so you can restart it immediately.

Hardware fails. Power supplies go kaput, fans break, temperature spikes, and hard drives fail. These hardware failures can and do happen, so you need advanced warning to find them and fix them quickly.

Someone changed something and it broke. Oftentimes, configuration changes can lead to performance problems. Did the Web team update the site? Was there a software update outside of a change request? Keep these peripheral factors in mind.

You’ve been hacked. According to a recent study by Ponemon Institute, survey participants experienced almost two cyber-attacks per week, many of which are DDOS attacks, as witnessed recently by Brian Krebs’ website.

Software requires updating. More often, software needs to be updated due to vulnerabilities; however, many updates fix functional bugs. In the Outlook.com example mentioned above, some functional updates can cause service outages if not applied timely and correctly.

From step 1, you have an idea of where you should focus how much of your effort. Taking it to the next step is a little tricky. For example, your application owner needs the application to be available Monday – Friday between the hours of 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., he expects no more than 1,000 users at once, and he expects users to be able to process a transaction in three minutes. 

With this information, you know critical alerts should fire during these business hours, it’s acceptable to perform software/firmware updates on the weekends or in the evening, and you have a baseline of acceptable performance from the end-user.

This application is comprised of several different components, including a Web server, application server, database and underlying hardware, storage, and networking elements. The SysAdmin is a jack of all trades who knows a little about a lot. What does it mean to monitor the SQL database? How does the SysAdmin monitor slow queries or table locks? What is a good value or a bad value? What should the threshold be? 

Luckily, there are tools that can automate a lot of the guessing and manual reporting when it comes to application performance. Tools these days should provide intelligence to what should be monitored, historical data for benchmarks/troubleshooting, and also the ability to get to the necessary details quickly.

What to Look for in Tools that Help Manage Application Performance

Application and server monitoring tools should be able to monitor across multiple components of the application to include server hardware, virtual machines, processes, services and performance metrics specific to a particular application. Tools should also provide thresholds based off best practices of what can be adjusted with historical insight as needed.

Patch management tools should provide information on which systems are out of compliance, be able to patch systems at discrete times, and inform IT when patches fail.

Configuration change management toolsshould identify and repair unauthorized configuration changes.

The time and cost associated with implementing APM tools should certainly outweigh the cost of application degradation or outage, and the IT labor costs of manually finding and fixing the problem.

ABOUT Jennifer Kuvlesky

Jennifer Kuvlesky is a Product Marketing Manager for SolarWinds, specializing in systems management. She has made her home in Austin, the high-tech capital of Texas, for more than 15 years, specializing in product management, strategy and marketing with solid knowledge of the systems and application and virtualization management market segments. Connect with Jennifer Kuvlesky on twitter @jenniferkuvlesk.

Related Links:

www.solarwinds.com

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Application Performance Management is More Than Application Performance Monitoring

Application Performance Management (APM), as defined by the industry, is focused on monitoring — because you can’t manage what you can’t see. But, there are other functions involved in managing application performance. 

For instance, this month we saw news that Outlook.com’s outage was due to a failed firmware update. Monitoring is a key element of ensuring application performance — however, other functions, such as patch management, are necessary to proactively prevent service failures. Below are a few practical considerations when delving into managing application performance.

Measuring Application Performance — What Should You Care About?

Before you start to monitor anything, you need to understand the expectations from the application’s end-users. This will help you focus on the metrics that really matter and prioritize the type of monitoring solution that is required.

For instance, is up/down monitoring adequate? Is an agentless solution sufficient? Or is something more robust needed to collect log files and so on? It’s your duty to weigh the needs of the business (i.e. what’s the impact if monitoring is not in place?) against the cost of the monitoring solution.

Having the end-user conversation will also help you understand the resource requirements for an application. Oftentimes, applications are deployed with more resources than is actually needed to meet performance objectives.

Time to Measure and Monitor — How Do You Know Application Performance is Out of Whack?

Let’s first answer this question by understanding some of the things that can go wrong:

Resources are constrained. This could happen because there is an influx of demand on the application (more users/customers). Some apps simply use more memory the longer they run. Processes can get out of control. Resource constraints can also occur if resources are shared between applications (e.g. in a virtual environment where too many VMs on the same server, SAN capacity, etc.).
 
Services stop. This can be caused by a fatal exception, etc. These things happen unexpectedly, so it’s good to have monitoring in place to alert you when a service has stopped so you can restart it immediately.

Hardware fails. Power supplies go kaput, fans break, temperature spikes, and hard drives fail. These hardware failures can and do happen, so you need advanced warning to find them and fix them quickly.

Someone changed something and it broke. Oftentimes, configuration changes can lead to performance problems. Did the Web team update the site? Was there a software update outside of a change request? Keep these peripheral factors in mind.

You’ve been hacked. According to a recent study by Ponemon Institute, survey participants experienced almost two cyber-attacks per week, many of which are DDOS attacks, as witnessed recently by Brian Krebs’ website.

Software requires updating. More often, software needs to be updated due to vulnerabilities; however, many updates fix functional bugs. In the Outlook.com example mentioned above, some functional updates can cause service outages if not applied timely and correctly.

From step 1, you have an idea of where you should focus how much of your effort. Taking it to the next step is a little tricky. For example, your application owner needs the application to be available Monday – Friday between the hours of 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., he expects no more than 1,000 users at once, and he expects users to be able to process a transaction in three minutes. 

With this information, you know critical alerts should fire during these business hours, it’s acceptable to perform software/firmware updates on the weekends or in the evening, and you have a baseline of acceptable performance from the end-user.

This application is comprised of several different components, including a Web server, application server, database and underlying hardware, storage, and networking elements. The SysAdmin is a jack of all trades who knows a little about a lot. What does it mean to monitor the SQL database? How does the SysAdmin monitor slow queries or table locks? What is a good value or a bad value? What should the threshold be? 

Luckily, there are tools that can automate a lot of the guessing and manual reporting when it comes to application performance. Tools these days should provide intelligence to what should be monitored, historical data for benchmarks/troubleshooting, and also the ability to get to the necessary details quickly.

What to Look for in Tools that Help Manage Application Performance

Application and server monitoring tools should be able to monitor across multiple components of the application to include server hardware, virtual machines, processes, services and performance metrics specific to a particular application. Tools should also provide thresholds based off best practices of what can be adjusted with historical insight as needed.

Patch management tools should provide information on which systems are out of compliance, be able to patch systems at discrete times, and inform IT when patches fail.

Configuration change management toolsshould identify and repair unauthorized configuration changes.

The time and cost associated with implementing APM tools should certainly outweigh the cost of application degradation or outage, and the IT labor costs of manually finding and fixing the problem.

ABOUT Jennifer Kuvlesky

Jennifer Kuvlesky is a Product Marketing Manager for SolarWinds, specializing in systems management. She has made her home in Austin, the high-tech capital of Texas, for more than 15 years, specializing in product management, strategy and marketing with solid knowledge of the systems and application and virtualization management market segments. Connect with Jennifer Kuvlesky on twitter @jenniferkuvlesk.

Related Links:

www.solarwinds.com

IT Budget Help: 4 Steps to Align IT Spending to Business Goals

Hot Topics

The Latest

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 ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

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Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...