Feature Articles

August 14, 2013

This is quite possibly the most important list we have posted on APMdigest. The bottom-line business benefits are what APM is really all about, or should be all about, although the market can forget this at times. But the reality is that no company should be deploying Application Performance Management unless they are using it to drive bottom-line business benefits such as those on this list. The benefits on this list are the payoff, the end result, the ultimate reason for APM ...

August 07, 2013
Kevin Smith

THINKstrategies conducted a recent survey to determine how Cloud Computing alternatives are affecting the IT Service and Client Management needs of organizations. While the vast majority of respondents are deploying on-premise Service and Client Management solutions, the tide is shifting to cloud-based implementations. And this raises big questions about the pros and cons of multi-tenant vs. single tenant cloud architectures that are increasingly relied upon to deliver Service and Client Management solutions ranging from running help desks and change management requests, to incident response processes, service catalogs and, in some cases, ITIL best practices ...

August 01, 2013
Tony Afshary

The data deluge has brought renewed focus on an old problem: the enormous performance gap that exists in input/output (I/O) between a server’s memory and its storage. I/O typically takes a mere 100 nanoseconds for information stored in the server’s memory, while I/O to a hard disk drive (HDD) takes about 10 milliseconds — a difference of five orders of magnitude that is having a profound adverse impact on application performance ...

July 15, 2013
Jeannie Liou

In mobile, APM has taken on new and critical importance. With mobile apps becoming increasingly vital to a business’ overall performance, it is important to manage
 and improve — not just measure — application performance. The following guidelines will arm IT leaders with the necessary steps to finding the right mobile app performance management solution for 100% success ...

July 08, 2013

Gartner's second annual Cool Vendors in APM report, authored by Jonah Kowall and Will Cappelli, covers companies that support the expanding landscape of APM, which is "not confined to views from the data center network alone, but also includes the Internet and mobile carrier networks" ...

June 27, 2013
Andrew Dean

It’s a fact that online businesses lose out on revenue when customers abandon their transactions due to website performance problems. We learned this lesson first hand at Thomas Cook Online, but we also learned that with a performance monitoring solution that scrutinizes customer experience, we could not only improve the performance of our website but also recapture lost business ...

May 21, 2013
Sasha Gilenson

DevOps emerged as a philosophy for bridging the gap between operations and development silos, where each focused on different priorities, using different processes and tools. This article will focus on some key challenges existing in the DevOps approach — challenges that leave operations to wade through overwhelming amounts of operational data — and how new analytics-based tools stand to provide insight into meaningful information, ultimately closing this gap, and putting development and operations into better synch ...

May 14, 2013

While the majority of IT professionals are confident in their ability to respond to the needs of the business, almost a third still equated the visibility of their IT department into their company's business initiatives to a foggy day in London, according to the 2013 Cisco Global IT Impact Survey ...

May 09, 2013
Suvish Viswanathan

The more effectively we can integrate management tools at every level and the more effectively we can manage the delivery of IT as a service to our constituents, the more value we add to the enterprise and its mission. At the same time, the further we enlarge those circles to encompass and integrate infrastructures that were previously disconnected, the greater the number of elements we need to incorporate, monitor and manage. We need something that ties all these disparate pieces together. That’s where the configuration management database (CMDB) fits in ...

May 06, 2013
Eran Kinsbruner

While mobile is quickly becoming the de-facto market platform for many of the business-critical applications deployed by banks, insurance companies and other enterprise organizations, the need to ensure an optimal end user experience mandates a robust mobile performance testing environment. Building an efficient mobile performance test strategy should consist of the following five pillars ...

April 24, 2013
Dave Berg

What if your mission-critical app is not designed to last? What if your app is perishable with a shelf life of only a few hours or days? With these apps, traditional monitoring and remediation become irrelevant. The app will expire before it can be fixed. But, that doesn't mean that perishable apps are fated to be poor performing and unsatisfying. Proper planning, testing, and additional resources can keep your perishable apps from going bad ...

April 17, 2013

What is it that drives the need for Application Performance Management? What are the main factors that can negatively impact application performance? What should you be looking out for? That is what this new APMdigest list reveals ...

April 15, 2013
Suvish Viswanathan

When you think about it, we’re not just focusing on application and network performance solely for the sake of performance. In today’s business environment, we’re focusing on performance because IT has become a service — and ultimately, we are the ones in charge of the delivery of that service. Given that reality, does it make any sense to treat IT operations management and IT service management as distinct and separate activities? I submit that it does not ...

April 10, 2013
Vincent Geffray

Blamestorming is a well-known game IT organizations spend hours playing every week. The goal of the game is to figure out the origin of an IT service degradation issue and collectively identify the one person — or the team — to blame ...

April 04, 2013

Software defined networking (SDN) is creating a lot of excitement in data centers, but current technology is still relatively immature. Joe Skorupa, VP and distinguished analyst at Gartner, explains that SDN is not only limited to data center and service provider networks ...

April 02, 2013
Suvish Viswanathan

It’s not just the network infrastructure that IT teams need to consider; it’s not even the increasingly complex application infrastructure that stands between the physical network infrastructure and the users. The challenge today involves the effective management of both these infrastructures as well the interplay between them — and it’s the interplay between them that poses the greatest challenge. Application-aware network performance management tools can help you overcome that challenge ...

March 29, 2013
Bojan Simic

The following are five interesting findings from TRAC Research's APM Spectrum report, based on more than 400 survey participants and more than 120 live interviews ...

March 21, 2013
Jennifer Kuvlesky

Application Performance Management, 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 ...

March 12, 2013
Gary Jackson

For many of us in the application or software development industry, APM was supposed to be a magic bullet, a way to catch the occasional unforeseen mistake that slipped through to production releases. In reality, even with APM tools reporting production issues, there has been no discernable increase in the quality of applications delivered ...

March 05, 2013
Matthew Selheimer

What’s the real value of Social IT? Will this just be a flash in the pan until we move on to the next claimed “breakthrough”? In other words, is Social IT really worth it such that it will actually stick around and become part of the fabric of how we manage IT as a discipline?

February 27, 2013
Chris Dancy

The IT world is rapidly evolving. Companies should review and evaluate 2012 challenges so they can be planned for and managed in 2013 ...

February 18, 2013

More than half of senior IT operations executives are dissatisfied with their APM solutions, and 75% are dissatisfied with their BSM solutions, according to a new BlueStripe survey of Fortune 500 companies ...

February 07, 2013
Miguel Tam

Smart businesses are always looking for ways to be more productive and cost effective by leveraging industry trends. Serena surveyed IT professionals and business executives in late 2012 on what they viewed as their top IT priorities for 2013. You may be surprised at the results ...

February 04, 2013
Gary Read

In a recent survey of 300 application developers, conducted by Boundary, we found that nearly 60 percent of participants had been affected by a Cloud outage. Around 72 percent of participants experienced significant costs from Cloud performance issues: thousands of dollars per incident and/or in excess of $100 per minute of downtime. This isn't stopping companies from moving to the Cloud, of course. The same survey found that 67% of developers say that their company is hosting “business-impacting” applications in the public Cloud ...

January 23, 2013
Jim Melvin

Without the capability to manage the performance lifecycle between the Cloud – whether public, private or hybrid – and the consumers of business critical applications and services, it is not possible to understand (let alone guarantee) necessary application service levels from the user’s perspective. This presents many challenges ...

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