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What You Should Be Monitoring to Ensure Digital Performance - Part 2

APMdigest asked experts from across the IT industry for their opinions on what IT departments should be monitoring to ensure digital performance. Part 2 covers key performance metrics like availability and response time.

Start with What You Should Be Monitoring to Ensure Digital Performance - Part 1

AVAILABILITY

To ensure digital performance, availability is one of three key performance areas I always recommend monitoring. Your applications and networks must first be available to service users and customers. Otherwise, they're useful to no one.
Jean Tunis
Senior Consultant and Founder of RootPerformance

Monitoring the login page of an application with a synthetic transaction is an essential part of an Enterprise Monitoring strategy. Active monitoring is a good starting point to provide visibility on application availability especially when monitoring outside the Data Center. Synthetic Transactions can provide location-based availability and act as a barometer for measuring application performance.
Larry Dragich
Technology Executive and Founder of the APM Strategies Group on LinkedIn.

Read Larry Dragich's latest blog: Digital Intelligence - Why Traditional APM Tools Aren't Sufficient

Read Larry Dragich's new white paper: The Case for Converged Application & Infrastructure Performance Monitoring

INFRASTRUCTURE RISK

Understanding Infrastructure Risk is a key component of monitoring that most organizations miss. APM tools do a great job of tracking left-to-right performance across an application, and modern application designs ensure that no single component can cause a failure. Building an understanding of the risk inherent in the current IT infrastructure — below the application — is critical for stopping unexpected downtime and sudden capacity limits. You can do that by tracking links from between overlay and underlay networks, file systems to storage units, and hypervisor to server hardware — or you can use a unified monitoring tool do do it for you. Key buying decision — can you see the IT infrastructure risk for the specific components that your application relies on?
Kent Erickson
Alliance Strategist, Zenoss

THROUGHPUT

To ensure digital performance, throughput is one of three key performance areas that must be included. Applications and networks must be able to provide all the relevant data that is required to fulfill a specific request. Monitoring throughput ensures you know when your systems do not deliver all of the data that was requested, and you can act on it before the complaints come in.
Jean Tunis
Senior Consultant and Founder of RootPerformance

PAGE LOAD SPEED

Ultimately you want to be monitoring everything that impacts customer experience and conversion rates, but the most important thing is the page load speed. This drives more conversions than any other factor. And the key pages are those at the beginning of a user journey since the more time someone has invested in the process the less likely they are to abandon.
Antony Edwards
CTO, Eggplant

RESPONSE TIME

To ensure digital performance, response time is one of three key performance areas that must not be forgotten. Requests for specific information from users must be fulfilled with as much speed as possible. This is a common expectation of every IT system, so you should be monitoring them.
Jean Tunis
Senior Consultant and Founder of RootPerformance

Monitor application response from user to application (last mile) and application to the data (middle mile) to not only measure is the app up but of it is working.
Jeanne Morain
Author and Strategist, iSpeak Cloud

TRANSACTION UPTIME

A good starting point is to implement end-to-end performance monitoring with real transaction uptime to complement your APM tools.
Sven Hammar
Founder and CSO, Apica

TIME TO FIRST BYTE

Initial motivation in the user journey can be lost very quickly if for example the first time the user clicks on an advertisement or logs into an application is not performant. The appearance of performance is important; monitoring time to first byte (TTFB)can help ascertain the experience of what a user sees marching towards a minimum viable/viewable product (MVP) of the page or app before being loaded to completion. TTFB is a leading indicator on web performance to the end user and also is used by the leading search engines in factoring in page rank as the more performant pages get a higher rank.
Ravi Lachhman
Evangelist, AppDynamics

LOG EVENTS

If it has an IP address, it sends logs, and logs must be monitored to gain detailed insight on server performance, security, error messages or underlying issues.
Clayton Dukes
CEO, LogZilla

Logs have been around since the dawn of computing, but with constantly increasing threats, logs are more important than ever. Log events are one of the key data sources SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) solutions use for threat detection.
Otis Gospodnetić
Founder, Sematext

Read What You Should Be Monitoring to Ensure Digital Performance - Part 3, covering the development side.

The Latest

Pilots are everywhere, stakeholders are seeking results, businesses are pushing for new tools, and IT teams are being asked to make AI secure, reliable, and useful at scale. But as organizations move from testing AI to operationalizing it, many are discovering that the biggest barrier is not the model, the use case, or even the budget. It is the file data foundation within ...

Fast or cheap? For most of my career in engineering, speed and quality sat on opposite ends of a seesaw. The "OR" in "fast or cheap" was non-negotiable. It was expected that pushing for faster releases meant that something in quality would give way. Tightening quality controls meant the schedule slipped. Every engineering leader I know has lived some version of that tradeoff ... The seesaw is starting to level out ...

I have been building enterprise software for more than 20 years ... One thing stays true across all of it: You do not find out your foundation is wrong during the crisis. You find out when the debt comes due. For a lot of organizations, that bill is arriving now. New research ... puts hard numbers on something practitioners have been sensing for a while. The telemetry problem isn't coming. It's already here ...

The rapid growth of AI workloads is pushing traditional log management approaches to their limits, according to The State of Log Management 2026 report from Dynatrace. Modern logs have become critical to understanding, validating, and securing AI-driven decisions, helping organizations ensure reliability, compliance, and performance at scale. However, the volume and complexity of AI telemetry are overwhelming legacy tools ...

For years, secure connectivity has relied on a familiar pattern: route traffic back to centralized gateways, inspect it, and then allow access. This model worked when applications lived in a handful of data centers and users were largely confined to offices. That model is now under strain. Applications are distributed across clouds, users connect from everywhere, and real-time workloads demand performance that centralized inspection points struggle to deliver. As traffic volumes grow and latency expectations shrink, routing everything through a small number of control points has become both a performance bottleneck and a resilience risk. The future of secure connectivity requires a different approach ...

The AI experimentation phase is over, and the private cloud is where enterprise AI workloads are being deployed for security and scale, according to Private Cloud Outlook 2026, a new report from Broadcom ... 2026 marks an acceleration into a full AI tipping point. The shift is being shaped by three forces — costs, complexity, and control — that public cloud environments are increasingly failing to address for production AI at scale. Key findings from the report include ...

44% of organizations have reported an outage in the past year tied to suppressed or ignored alerts, and 78% had at least one incident where no alert was fired at all ... Engineers learned about failures from customers. That gap between what our tools report and what our customers experience is the problem DevOps teams have been quietly solving with GenAI tooling, even as most enterprises continue to run their NOCs on manual alert triage ...

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...

77% of leaders say their teams need AI skills urgently. 64% say their organization plans to train current employees rather than hire new ones. So far, so reasonable. The part that surprised me is who's been put in charge: 34% of those leaders say IT and engineering own the AI skills mandate. Learning and Development or HR own it at 7% of organizations. That's roughly five-to-one in favor of the people who understand the tools, over the people whose actual job is teaching adults how to learn new ones ...

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, enterprises are increasingly focused on enhancing their observability stacks to gain deeper insights into their IT environments. Observability has become a cornerstone of modern IT operations, enabling organizations to monitor, diagnose, and optimize their systems with unprecedented precision. However, a critical piece of the puzzle often goes unnoticed in this transformation: IBM i ...

What You Should Be Monitoring to Ensure Digital Performance - Part 2

APMdigest asked experts from across the IT industry for their opinions on what IT departments should be monitoring to ensure digital performance. Part 2 covers key performance metrics like availability and response time.

Start with What You Should Be Monitoring to Ensure Digital Performance - Part 1

AVAILABILITY

To ensure digital performance, availability is one of three key performance areas I always recommend monitoring. Your applications and networks must first be available to service users and customers. Otherwise, they're useful to no one.
Jean Tunis
Senior Consultant and Founder of RootPerformance

Monitoring the login page of an application with a synthetic transaction is an essential part of an Enterprise Monitoring strategy. Active monitoring is a good starting point to provide visibility on application availability especially when monitoring outside the Data Center. Synthetic Transactions can provide location-based availability and act as a barometer for measuring application performance.
Larry Dragich
Technology Executive and Founder of the APM Strategies Group on LinkedIn.

Read Larry Dragich's latest blog: Digital Intelligence - Why Traditional APM Tools Aren't Sufficient

Read Larry Dragich's new white paper: The Case for Converged Application & Infrastructure Performance Monitoring

INFRASTRUCTURE RISK

Understanding Infrastructure Risk is a key component of monitoring that most organizations miss. APM tools do a great job of tracking left-to-right performance across an application, and modern application designs ensure that no single component can cause a failure. Building an understanding of the risk inherent in the current IT infrastructure — below the application — is critical for stopping unexpected downtime and sudden capacity limits. You can do that by tracking links from between overlay and underlay networks, file systems to storage units, and hypervisor to server hardware — or you can use a unified monitoring tool do do it for you. Key buying decision — can you see the IT infrastructure risk for the specific components that your application relies on?
Kent Erickson
Alliance Strategist, Zenoss

THROUGHPUT

To ensure digital performance, throughput is one of three key performance areas that must be included. Applications and networks must be able to provide all the relevant data that is required to fulfill a specific request. Monitoring throughput ensures you know when your systems do not deliver all of the data that was requested, and you can act on it before the complaints come in.
Jean Tunis
Senior Consultant and Founder of RootPerformance

PAGE LOAD SPEED

Ultimately you want to be monitoring everything that impacts customer experience and conversion rates, but the most important thing is the page load speed. This drives more conversions than any other factor. And the key pages are those at the beginning of a user journey since the more time someone has invested in the process the less likely they are to abandon.
Antony Edwards
CTO, Eggplant

RESPONSE TIME

To ensure digital performance, response time is one of three key performance areas that must not be forgotten. Requests for specific information from users must be fulfilled with as much speed as possible. This is a common expectation of every IT system, so you should be monitoring them.
Jean Tunis
Senior Consultant and Founder of RootPerformance

Monitor application response from user to application (last mile) and application to the data (middle mile) to not only measure is the app up but of it is working.
Jeanne Morain
Author and Strategist, iSpeak Cloud

TRANSACTION UPTIME

A good starting point is to implement end-to-end performance monitoring with real transaction uptime to complement your APM tools.
Sven Hammar
Founder and CSO, Apica

TIME TO FIRST BYTE

Initial motivation in the user journey can be lost very quickly if for example the first time the user clicks on an advertisement or logs into an application is not performant. The appearance of performance is important; monitoring time to first byte (TTFB)can help ascertain the experience of what a user sees marching towards a minimum viable/viewable product (MVP) of the page or app before being loaded to completion. TTFB is a leading indicator on web performance to the end user and also is used by the leading search engines in factoring in page rank as the more performant pages get a higher rank.
Ravi Lachhman
Evangelist, AppDynamics

LOG EVENTS

If it has an IP address, it sends logs, and logs must be monitored to gain detailed insight on server performance, security, error messages or underlying issues.
Clayton Dukes
CEO, LogZilla

Logs have been around since the dawn of computing, but with constantly increasing threats, logs are more important than ever. Log events are one of the key data sources SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) solutions use for threat detection.
Otis Gospodnetić
Founder, Sematext

Read What You Should Be Monitoring to Ensure Digital Performance - Part 3, covering the development side.

The Latest

Pilots are everywhere, stakeholders are seeking results, businesses are pushing for new tools, and IT teams are being asked to make AI secure, reliable, and useful at scale. But as organizations move from testing AI to operationalizing it, many are discovering that the biggest barrier is not the model, the use case, or even the budget. It is the file data foundation within ...

Fast or cheap? For most of my career in engineering, speed and quality sat on opposite ends of a seesaw. The "OR" in "fast or cheap" was non-negotiable. It was expected that pushing for faster releases meant that something in quality would give way. Tightening quality controls meant the schedule slipped. Every engineering leader I know has lived some version of that tradeoff ... The seesaw is starting to level out ...

I have been building enterprise software for more than 20 years ... One thing stays true across all of it: You do not find out your foundation is wrong during the crisis. You find out when the debt comes due. For a lot of organizations, that bill is arriving now. New research ... puts hard numbers on something practitioners have been sensing for a while. The telemetry problem isn't coming. It's already here ...

The rapid growth of AI workloads is pushing traditional log management approaches to their limits, according to The State of Log Management 2026 report from Dynatrace. Modern logs have become critical to understanding, validating, and securing AI-driven decisions, helping organizations ensure reliability, compliance, and performance at scale. However, the volume and complexity of AI telemetry are overwhelming legacy tools ...

For years, secure connectivity has relied on a familiar pattern: route traffic back to centralized gateways, inspect it, and then allow access. This model worked when applications lived in a handful of data centers and users were largely confined to offices. That model is now under strain. Applications are distributed across clouds, users connect from everywhere, and real-time workloads demand performance that centralized inspection points struggle to deliver. As traffic volumes grow and latency expectations shrink, routing everything through a small number of control points has become both a performance bottleneck and a resilience risk. The future of secure connectivity requires a different approach ...

The AI experimentation phase is over, and the private cloud is where enterprise AI workloads are being deployed for security and scale, according to Private Cloud Outlook 2026, a new report from Broadcom ... 2026 marks an acceleration into a full AI tipping point. The shift is being shaped by three forces — costs, complexity, and control — that public cloud environments are increasingly failing to address for production AI at scale. Key findings from the report include ...

44% of organizations have reported an outage in the past year tied to suppressed or ignored alerts, and 78% had at least one incident where no alert was fired at all ... Engineers learned about failures from customers. That gap between what our tools report and what our customers experience is the problem DevOps teams have been quietly solving with GenAI tooling, even as most enterprises continue to run their NOCs on manual alert triage ...

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...

77% of leaders say their teams need AI skills urgently. 64% say their organization plans to train current employees rather than hire new ones. So far, so reasonable. The part that surprised me is who's been put in charge: 34% of those leaders say IT and engineering own the AI skills mandate. Learning and Development or HR own it at 7% of organizations. That's roughly five-to-one in favor of the people who understand the tools, over the people whose actual job is teaching adults how to learn new ones ...

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, enterprises are increasingly focused on enhancing their observability stacks to gain deeper insights into their IT environments. Observability has become a cornerstone of modern IT operations, enabling organizations to monitor, diagnose, and optimize their systems with unprecedented precision. However, a critical piece of the puzzle often goes unnoticed in this transformation: IBM i ...