Feature Articles

May 10, 2012
David Williams

Visibility in the cloud is essential, and you can't ensure a high level of user satisfaction unless you understand how users are experiencing access to cloud services. That requires monitoring performance from the user's perspective and following these six recommendations ...

April 19, 2012
Irad Deutsch

One of the common questions that every IT manager asks on a regular basis is, “Why is my application so slow today when everything was fine yesterday?” APM is the only way to truly answer that question, and it is one of the must-have tools for every IT manager. With this APM imperative in mind, the following are 10 capabilities every IT manager should look for when choosing an APM solution ...

April 09, 2012
Kristen Allmacher

Where web applications are concerned, consider that conversion rates increase 74 percent when page load times decrease from eight to two seconds. Conversely, some research reveals that when a supply chain management application is down, these businesses lose $11,000 per minute. This article will explore the business impact of application performance and why the end-user experience is the ultimate measure of success ...

April 06, 2012
Antonio Piraino

Moving to cloud computing does not have to be a leap of faith. Doing your homework can also prevent a bad decision, because moving an application into the cloud – while technically feasible and fairly easy – may not always reap the benefits you expect. Here are some items to consider before, during and after migrating an application to the cloud ...

April 03, 2012
Shweta Darbha

With new technologies presenting a broader range of methods for network access and use, the complexities of supporting services across the enterprise are becoming even more challenging. With these challenges in mind, the following three key factors are certain to play significant roles in next-generation network management capabilities and solutions in the years to come ...

March 12, 2012
Pam Snaith

Infrastructure Management is so 1990s. Everyone has it. Could there be anything interesting left to say? Yes -- that it is more critical than ever. It may still be just the plumbing but the demands on it are only growing and yesterday’s point solutions won't do the job ...

March 05, 2012
Jonathan Reeve

As companies look to maintain a competitive advantage, IT professionals are increasingly being charged with adopting a business-focused mindset. The role of an IT manager is no longer simply ensuring that systems and networks are functioning properly – they now need to be adept at anticipating business needs and having a recommendation on how to address them ...

February 23, 2012
Aruna Ravichandran

If an attacker were bogging down your apps, how would you know? You wouldn't, unless you bridge the gap between ops and security ...

February 08, 2012
Tim Grieser

Operational complexity in virtualized, scale-out, and cloud environments and composite Web-based applications will drive demand for automated analytic performance management and optimization tools that can quickly discover, filter, correlate, remediate, and ideally prevent performance and availability slowdowns, outages, and other service-interrupting incidents ...

February 02, 2012
Vic Nyman

At BlueStripe, we surveyed 126 IT operations and production support executives at enterprise-level organizations. We were interested about the range of applications they’re responsible for, the most pressing challenges, and if their management tools were effective enough for them to do their jobs. The executives responded with a clear “no” on the latter inquiry. Here’s a summary of the survey results ...

January 18, 2012
David Williams and Leslie Minnix-Wolfe

End-user behavior learning technology provides the business with a view into how each end-user interacts with their online business services to ensure a superior user experience. The business learns about user experiences based on past online activity, and quickly and proactively adjusts to meet expected levels of service regardless of the conditions or variables ...

January 05, 2012
Srinivas Ramanathan

Once a decision to try out VDI is made, the primary focus is to benchmark the performance of physical desktops, model their usage, predict the virtualized user experience and based on the results, determine which desktops can be virtualized and which can't ...

January 04, 2012

As a continuation of the APMdigest list of predictions for 2012, industry experts offer a range of predictions specifically on cloud management, and Application Performance Management in the cloud ...

December 21, 2011
Raj Sabhlok and Suvish Viswanathan

The quality of an end user's experience of an application is becoming an ever more important consideration in the APM world. Increasingly, multiple applications and loosely coupled infrastructure components are coming together to contribute to the end user's experience. Understanding how all those applications and components are interacting at the point where the user is engaging them is crucial to an understanding of the user's experience ...

December 20, 2011

Industry experts from analyst and consulting firms and all the top vendors offer thoughtful, insightful, and sometimes controversial predictions on how Application Performance Management and related BSM and ITSM technologies will change and impact business in 2012 ...

December 15, 2011
David Hurwitz

Instead of throwing applications “over the fence” blindly to operations, a fluid and much more effective DevOps process inserts transparency, efficiency and ownership into the art of developing, releasing and the production use of critical applications. It also binds the two traditionally siloed teams together. The following are six critical steps IT can take to improve DevOps collaboration and ultimately the business bottom line, profitability ...

December 14, 2011
Jonathan Reeve

Storage arrays are faster and easier to configure, but with applications riding on top of virtualization using shared storage, arrays are often the hidden cause of application performance issues ...

December 05, 2011
Michael Sydor

If you’ve been thinking that your application is a candidate for the cloud then you need to obtain a real understanding of the performance capabilities and discuss with your cloud suppliers just what they can do to maintain or increase your current performance ...

December 05, 2011
Yuval Cohen

Neebula conducted a Business Service Management survey, covering 84 companies that have recently completed BSM projects. The majority of BSM projects took too long to complete, did not succeed to maintain accurate service models, and most of all, failed to meet their objectives ...

December 03, 2011
Raj Sabhlok and Suvish Viswanathan

APMdigest followers will already have read the article on Gartner's 5 Dimensions of APM. We'd like to look at this matter from a different angle: What are the important issues and goals to consider when evaluating a suite of APM solutions -- from one or more vendors -- to ensure that your APM solution will help IT operate at the new speed of business?

December 02, 2011
Pete Goldin

Gartner's recently published Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring defines “five distinct dimensions of, or perspectives on, end-to-end application performance” which are essential to APM ...

November 18, 2011
Zohar Gilad

The consumer IT movement means that expectations for performance have changed dramatically. Developers and IT managers need to understand the requirements for “instant-on” apps. If an application stops working, the user will ditch it and go download something else. So what can you do to avoid mobile application meltdown and failed ROI ...

November 17, 2011
Steve Tack

Mobile has arrived and is accelerating in a big way across industries like retail, financial services, travel and entertainment. To capitalize on the mobile web opportunity, you need to make your site's mobile user experience as fast, reliable, high-quality and user-friendly as possible ...

November 16, 2011
Zubair Aleem

Deciding to take the plunge and start Application Performance Management is a big first step. Choosing which application(s) to start monitoring is the next one. I suggest that Exchange is the perfect starting point ...

November 11, 2011
Charley Rich

Many things can, and will, go wrong during the development of an enterprise application. These issues underscore the importance of using test cycles to detect potential performance-robbing defects before the application is moved into production ...

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