Feature Articles
A recent survey of IT Operations executives found the following to be the most impactful challenges facing their teams ...
As with any shiny new technology that changes the world in a rush, BYOD has produced a growing problem for IT managers. Few organizations believe they have an adequate BYOD management plan and it’s further compounded by the ever-increasing MDM problem that had already been an issue for some time ...
As the technology services director of JMC IT, I have first hand experience transforming our company from typically reactive to a proactive, full-service MSP. Here are three lessons I learned throughout the implementation process ...
Windows 8 represents the very latest in application development and deployment architecture from Microsoft, allowing today’s developers to showcase their applications on a new and modern platform. But how will it change APM?
Most security reference architectures rely on the old methods to get warnings about security issues such as use of a SIEM and a log analysis tool to interpret what is in the SIEM. However, there is a richer set of more immediate data that can help us with the problem of security notifications: APM Data ...
Industry experts - from analysts and consultants to users and the top vendors - offer thoughtful, insightful, and sometimes controversial and contradictory predictions on how APM will change and impact business in 2013 ...
Recently, Art Wittmann at InformationWeek claimed that the APM industry was dying. He wrote, “App performance management is seen as less important than it was two years ago, partly because vendors haven’t kept up.” I would argue it is not APM as a whole that is dying but rather legacy APM solutions ...
We have been talking about this problem for years - the gap between IT and Business. All the experts have advised that bridging this gap should be a high priority for any company. The following is catalog of suggestions from across the APM industry on how to bring IT and Business closer together ...
Every organization today is looking to improve efficiencies and reduce costs. In addition, organizations are trying to be more responsive to their internal customer demands. Maybe your ITIL-based Service Desk solution can help ...
Separate application and network monitoring approaches simply won’t cut it anymore. To be truly successful, your organization must bring these two solutions together ...
Today’s small businesses are getting a competitive lift thanks to mobile devices, according to a new report by technology solutions provider CDW. The biggest challenge of mobility is managing the multitude of devices that employees use for work ...
Continuous delivery, continuous deployment and continuous integration — what do these all mean and are they the same thing, or even related? There is a lot of confusion around continuous delivery, but what isn't a mystery is that this topic and manner of releasing applications into production is a hot button issue in the industry right now ...
This is an epic list of mistakes. These are the top reasons why APM deployments fail, according to many of the industry's top experts – including consultants, analysts, vendors and users – and also some of the solutions that help you overcome these challenges ...
Gartner, Inc. highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2013, presented during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo ...
Preventing a slow application caused by probable resource contention requires a rigorous methodological approach and an appropriate toolset. IT managers, working with business owners, should prioritize critical apps for multi-tenancy and maximum performance ...
The value that end-user activity monitoring (EUAM) provides has become clear. By monitoring users in real time, you can help ensure application performance and identify errors before they affect anyone. However, many IT organizations continue to wrestle with how to use the data gathered from monitoring activities to increase business understanding and to enhance the quality of the user's experience ...
If you're the type of person that puts off holiday shopping until the last minute, Christmas 2012 may still seem like forever away, but September 16 marked 100 days until the biggest retail holiday of the year - the time is NOW to have your business-critical applications and systems ready to handle the rush ...
“Big Data” is everywhere. What does it mean? Just as Cloud Computing bursted onto the scene a few years ago, it depends on whom you ask ...
Ongoing hype around private cloud computing is creating misperceptions about private cloud, according to Gartner. To help reduce the hype and identify the real value of private cloud computing for IT leaders, Gartner explains five common misconceptions about private cloud ...
CMOs and CIOs must join forces in order to connect with today's consumer across new channels including mobile devices and social networks. However marketers often point to their lack of alignment with the company's IT department as the biggest obstacle to reaching today's consumers ...
For those of us who handle IT change requests on a daily basis, the process can seem as onerous as a Sisyphean task. In this case, rather than a boulder rolling back down the hill, it is the backlog of RFCs that seem to grow every time you complete a request. Let’s face it - the requests are not going to stop coming. The business is trying to change faster, so they need IT to implement change faster. In the end, it is all about doing as much as you can with what you have. Following ITIL best practices and using a solid change management tool goes a long way, but how can the whole task be made less Sisyphean? The answer may come from borrowing some of the lessons learned from application development ...
The explosion in Big Data proves that most organizations have the monitoring part down. The challenge is what to do with all the data, once collected. How can you correlate and analyze Big Data, and make some sense out of it? This is the key to the future of APM ...
The results of the APMdigest Big Data survey are in – revealing significant increases in the growth of IT environments, volume and diversity of performance metrics, and data monitoring frequency. The survey also shows "APM-generated Big Data" as a specific use case of the broader Big Data problem, typically requiring analysis and correlation of real-time data for operational impact ...
There are probably more myths and misunderstandings about the term DevOps than there are hard facts. I recently sat down with Gene Kim and Patrick Debois - two of the DevOps movement's most widely practiced individuals - to cut through the noise. We swapped experiences and discussed how a CIO should be thinking about DevOps, when to consider a DevOps approach, the business case for adopting it, patterns of success and patterns of failure. We agreed that there are three general attributes that provide a good indication that DevOps might help your organization ...
While organizations generally agree that ITIL-based process improvements are a "good" thing, executives often struggle to measure quantifiable benefits of investment in the framework. We have found that an effective approach to ITIL is characterized by a manageable yet scalable implementation, a focus on people and skills issues, and ongoing measurement that takes a comprehensive view of the enterprise-wide impact of process maturity ...