Feature Articles

June 20, 2014

APMdigest continues the list, cataloging the many valuable tools available – beyond what is technically categorized as APM – to support the goals of improving application performance and business service. Entries 11-15 are all about the network ...

June 19, 2014

APMdigest continues the list, cataloging the many valuable tools available – beyond APM – to support the goals of improving application performance and business service. Entries 6-10 involve monitoring, testing and logging ...

June 17, 2014

While Application Performance Management is the focus of APMdigest, we have always maintained a very broad coverage of technologies that relate to application performance and business service. Rather than only discuss APM tools, we feature articles, blogs, news and other content on a variety of related tools, most of which you will see on the list. With this list, APMdigest is cataloging the many valuable tools available – beyond what is technically categorized as APM – to support goals of improving application performance and business service ...

June 10, 2014
Ennio Carboni

It’s been four years since the last World Cup and more than a few soccer fans around the globe are eagerly awaiting the big kick-off later this week in Brazil. So what does the World Cup mean for your network? A great deal actually.World Cup matches will often run during the American work day. You can bet that many of your employees will be streaming games and highlights across your network on their personal devices or company-issued laptops. As a result, traffic spikes will cause wireless bandwidth issues, network and application performance will take a hit, and along with that, so will employee productivity. Factor in the deluge of resulting help desk support calls and a little pre-emptive strike will go a long way. Here are five steps network managers and administrators can take to help prepare for the world’s most watched online event ...

May 20, 2014
Trevor Parsons

Logs have moved beyond a basic tool for debugging during development. A recent survey shows that the most common use case is using log data for production monitoring, which has traditionally been the stronghold of APM and server monitoring tools. When using your logs for performance monitoring, here are some useful steps you can follow to dig a little deeper into any issues that you identify ...

May 09, 2014

Agile infrastructures demand that infrastructure and operations (I&O) managers acquire the performance management skills present only in Web-scale IT, according to Gartner ...

May 06, 2014
David Hayward

With every minute you can shave off root cause analysis, you get a minute closer to restoring the performance or availability of a process that's important to your business. But the plethora of monitoring tools used throughout your organization, each with its own root cause perspective about the IT environment, can lead to confusion, dysfunction and drawn-out debate when things go wrong. To get the most business value from these diverse views, you need to understand how they can work together ...

May 01, 2014
Vincent Geffray

For companies doing business over the web, any degradation of the customer online experience can have a negative and immediate impact. When a website does not operate fast enough on customers' screens and mobile devices, there's a serious problem. "Blamestorming" sessions are often useless, however. Almost every time, the cause will be found with one or several third-party content providers. Ironically, while the goal of these services is to enable rich end-user experiences, they can actually have the adverse effect of slowing down a site and driving end users away ...

April 16, 2014
Bob Wescott

Performance monitoring is about understanding what's happening right now. It usually includes dealing with immediate performance problems or collecting data that will be used by the other performance tools (such as capacity planning) to plan for future peak loads ...

April 03, 2014
Josh Galde

Keynote recently conducted a survey of more than 1,600 mobile website and app developers, IT and quality assurance professionals, to help determine the state of mobile testing practices and tools. The survey, the largest of its kind ever undertaken, asked respondents about the structure of their organizations, their most pressing challenges, and what tools and processes they are utilizing to address those challenges and assure the highest levels of mobile quality ...

March 20, 2014
Richard Rauch

"Big Data" is among the hottest topics in business today. Executives want to know how to gain actionable insights and make decisions from the flood of data and metadata pouring out of their networks. That's good – it's their job to look for any way they can increase sales, reduce waste, and generally improve their business efficiency. But to get to those actionable insights, you first have to make some kind of sense of all this data ...

March 17, 2014
Brad Hale

Even non-sports fans can get swept up in March Madness mania. However, when it comes to live streaming games on company-owned devices, on the company network and/or during office hours, end users can wreak havoc on the network. So how can IT pros prepare for March Madness (and other popular live streaming events)? We've compiled five tips to help keep networks running smoothly ...

March 04, 2014
Charley Rich

IT organizations are under more pressure to deliver exceptional business performance than ever. Further complicating the challenge is the evolving nature of IT. The rise of Big Data, mobile, cloud, and BYOD have added complexity, making it ever more challenging for IT to acquire the visibility they need to detect anomalies. Such situations are why Application Performance Management (APM) solutions exist. Most APM solutions do a good job of monitoring individual applications. But monitoring is not enough ...

February 25, 2014

Today, there is a convergence of factors coming together like a perfect storm, making Application Performance Management (APM) more important than ever. On Part Two of this list, industry experts - from analysts and consultants to users and the top vendors - demonstrate just how many impending challenges make APM an absolute necessity in 2014 ...

February 24, 2014

Today, there is a convergence of factors coming together like a perfect storm, making Application Performance Management (APM) more important than ever. On Part One of this list, industry experts - from analysts and consultants to users and the top vendors - demonstrate just how many impending challenges make APM an absolute necessity in 2014 ...

February 18, 2014
Heiko Specht

On Tuesday, January 21, one of the biggest outages in history — if not the world's largest outage — happened to the Internet in China. The web was essentially unavailable for one of the strongest and fastest growing economies for one full business day. The China example highlights how that reliance on third-party services comes with the downside of increased vulnerability and fragility. In this era of increased interdependency, what can an organization do to better protect and insulate its web performance?

February 13, 2014
Gregory Mooney

How high are mobile user's expectations? According to this new SmartBear research, 50% of mobile consumers will delete a mobile app after encountering a single bug. One bug could lose a customer forever – and maybe a few of their friends! More than a third of consumers will report a bug on a public forum, to the app provider or to their peers. For app developers and testers, this is a dangerous statistic ...

February 10, 2014
Mike Heumann

The Sochi Winter Olympics are officially underway, and NBC will once again be providing viewers access to live streaming in a multitude of mediums. As NBC makes it easier and easier to bring the Olympics viewing experience to the office, are network operations staff prepared for the potential bandwidth onslaught?

February 04, 2014
Robert Stroud

The Enterprise IT support center has become a feature of almost every enterprise, but it is becoming commoditized and may be displaced by external service providers unless it can justify its existence ...

January 30, 2014
Josh Stephens

Moving your applications to the cloud has undeniable benefits. But when things go wrong, it's hard to know where the bottlenecks are. Here are four best practices to optimize your application performance monitoring ...

January 14, 2014
Tom Lubinski

The first step in making any system more automatic (and thus more reliable) is to dramatically reduce the amount of manual maintenance required ...

January 13, 2014
Tom Lubinski

The Configuration Management Database, or CMDB, was conceived a few years back as a way to discover and maintain a repository of all components on which an application is dependent, along with information about their relationships. The thought was that combining the CMDB with real-time monitoring metrics obtained from the underlying components could provide insight into the health state of complex applications, with early warning of incipient problems, and guidance to root cause when incidents do occur. Sounds like a really great idea. Why then, has the CMDB seen only limited adoption and little commercial success?

January 08, 2014
Matthew Ainsworth

HealthCare.gov was possibly the world's most important IT project of the moment, yet it performed as if it were rolled out the door without so much as a cursory kick of the tires. That's because it probably was – and that's far from unusual. A recent LinkedIn/Empirix survey found that at most companies and public agencies, pre-deployment testing is half-hearted at best and non-existent at worst ...

January 06, 2014

Interested in what everyone else is reading? The following is a list of the top articles and blogs - in terms of views - on APMdigest for 2013 ...

December 17, 2013

In APMdigest's highly popular and well-respected annual list of APM predictions, industry experts - from analysts and consultants to users and the top vendors - offer thoughtful, insightful, and sometimes controversial predictions on how Application Performance Management (APM) will evolve and impact business in 2014 ...

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