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Real-Time IT Visibility Through Integration for Efficient Application Performance Management

Suvish Viswanathan

Though Application Performance Management (APM) has been in use for a long time, you all must have observed a sudden rise in the usage of APM from the past few years. Earlier the industry was all going gung-ho about several other topics including Business Service Management (BSM). BSM includes managing your business-critical services with an ITIL twist. Here I am not trying to be anti-BSM but in today's challenging economy, where expectations from IT to deliver and cater to businesses is higher than ever, it is imperative to manage your business-critical applications by keeping the end-user experience in consideration.

We have seen several outages in the past year. There was RIM's major outage, Amazon's IaaS division has gone down couple of times, and several other small outages that have happened. What do all these outages have in common? IT is the first to get blamed. And why shouldn't it? It's IT that gave confidence to businesses to deliver, and when it fails no one else is to take the blame.

Digging deeper into these outages, one can come to an easy conclusion of lack-of-visibility that resulted in taking wrong decisions based on assumptions. Apart from the businesses’ losses, who loses the most? It's the end users who put their trust in the application.

The Art of Realizing Efficient APM

When APM was introduced, it was just used to monitor and manage applications. Today, however, it has become more complex. Today APM is a type of system-management application which focuses on monitoring and managing resources that in turn determine the health and availability of all Web and non-Web-based business-critical applications. We could say that virtualization and cloud has enhanced the efficiency and productivity of IT.

However, we also cannot deny the fact that it has also brought in a huge management complexity. Amidst this complexity APM cannot just be about dashboards with green and red lights showing availability of resources. Today an application is inter-linked with hundreds of other devices.

Efficient APM is all about giving insights into the inter-dependency of all devices and showing various business transactions that are taking place to realize what an end-user is experiencing. Here I remember one of my previous blogs on the 5 dimensions of APM. At the end of the day, the ultimate goal is to create systems that are robust and can give real-time visibility into events and transactions that are in progress or complete.

Integration and APM

One of the major (and most common problems) I have observed is the lack of visibility into the IT infrastructure. This leads to not being able to prioritize events based on their importance to business. An effective APM strategy allows organizations to view the impact on businesses and map them to different transactions. But how can one adapt an efficient APM process when different monitoring solutions are being used?

Unless IT operations and IT service management are brought together it’s nearly impossible to analyze the following:

- Which component is impacting what applications

- How various transactions are being experienced by end-users

- What’s the SLA breach with status of various technicians who have been assigned to manage tickets

Yes, I am talking about that holistic solution which will give you visibility into all that is happening in the real-time IT environment on a single console.

Such solutions will:

- Enhance productivity and efficiency between teams

- Help in prioritizing events that have an impact on business transactions and can be viewed with interdependency mapping

- Allow proactive monitoring and management of systems as thresholds set for one application will take care of all the other underlying configured-system components

- Enhance the end-user experience as visibility allows in optimizing the resource-allocation process

- Allow accurate decisions to happen as KPIs will indicate the overall performance and with integrated CMDB and other ITIL processes like Change and Incident management. This makes decisions even easier as all data related to configurable items are stored in a single location

- Optimize budget allocation and management

A complete APM strategy and solution offers benefits that are measurable. The result is an agile and productive environment. This allows enterprises to break IT silos and view IT as a single entity. Organizations can concentrate more on innovations that make end-users lives easy, than falling behind in fixing system issues.

Suvish Viswanathan is Sr. Research Analyst, Integrated IT Management, for ManageEngine.

Related Links:

www.ManageEngine.com

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Real-Time IT Visibility Through Integration for Efficient Application Performance Management

Suvish Viswanathan

Though Application Performance Management (APM) has been in use for a long time, you all must have observed a sudden rise in the usage of APM from the past few years. Earlier the industry was all going gung-ho about several other topics including Business Service Management (BSM). BSM includes managing your business-critical services with an ITIL twist. Here I am not trying to be anti-BSM but in today's challenging economy, where expectations from IT to deliver and cater to businesses is higher than ever, it is imperative to manage your business-critical applications by keeping the end-user experience in consideration.

We have seen several outages in the past year. There was RIM's major outage, Amazon's IaaS division has gone down couple of times, and several other small outages that have happened. What do all these outages have in common? IT is the first to get blamed. And why shouldn't it? It's IT that gave confidence to businesses to deliver, and when it fails no one else is to take the blame.

Digging deeper into these outages, one can come to an easy conclusion of lack-of-visibility that resulted in taking wrong decisions based on assumptions. Apart from the businesses’ losses, who loses the most? It's the end users who put their trust in the application.

The Art of Realizing Efficient APM

When APM was introduced, it was just used to monitor and manage applications. Today, however, it has become more complex. Today APM is a type of system-management application which focuses on monitoring and managing resources that in turn determine the health and availability of all Web and non-Web-based business-critical applications. We could say that virtualization and cloud has enhanced the efficiency and productivity of IT.

However, we also cannot deny the fact that it has also brought in a huge management complexity. Amidst this complexity APM cannot just be about dashboards with green and red lights showing availability of resources. Today an application is inter-linked with hundreds of other devices.

Efficient APM is all about giving insights into the inter-dependency of all devices and showing various business transactions that are taking place to realize what an end-user is experiencing. Here I remember one of my previous blogs on the 5 dimensions of APM. At the end of the day, the ultimate goal is to create systems that are robust and can give real-time visibility into events and transactions that are in progress or complete.

Integration and APM

One of the major (and most common problems) I have observed is the lack of visibility into the IT infrastructure. This leads to not being able to prioritize events based on their importance to business. An effective APM strategy allows organizations to view the impact on businesses and map them to different transactions. But how can one adapt an efficient APM process when different monitoring solutions are being used?

Unless IT operations and IT service management are brought together it’s nearly impossible to analyze the following:

- Which component is impacting what applications

- How various transactions are being experienced by end-users

- What’s the SLA breach with status of various technicians who have been assigned to manage tickets

Yes, I am talking about that holistic solution which will give you visibility into all that is happening in the real-time IT environment on a single console.

Such solutions will:

- Enhance productivity and efficiency between teams

- Help in prioritizing events that have an impact on business transactions and can be viewed with interdependency mapping

- Allow proactive monitoring and management of systems as thresholds set for one application will take care of all the other underlying configured-system components

- Enhance the end-user experience as visibility allows in optimizing the resource-allocation process

- Allow accurate decisions to happen as KPIs will indicate the overall performance and with integrated CMDB and other ITIL processes like Change and Incident management. This makes decisions even easier as all data related to configurable items are stored in a single location

- Optimize budget allocation and management

A complete APM strategy and solution offers benefits that are measurable. The result is an agile and productive environment. This allows enterprises to break IT silos and view IT as a single entity. Organizations can concentrate more on innovations that make end-users lives easy, than falling behind in fixing system issues.

Suvish Viswanathan is Sr. Research Analyst, Integrated IT Management, for ManageEngine.

Related Links:

www.ManageEngine.com

5 dimensions of APM

Delivering Deep Insights Into End User Quality of Experience

APM

Hot Topics

The Latest

64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...

Cloud computing has transformed how we build and scale software, but it has also quietly introduced one of the most persistent challenges in modern IT: cost visibility and control ... So why, after more than a decade of cloud adoption, are cloud costs still spiraling out of control? The answer lies not in tooling but in culture ...

CEOs are committed to advancing AI solutions across their organization even as they face challenges from accelerating technology adoption, according to the IBM CEO Study. The survey revealed that executive respondents expect the growth rate of AI investments to more than double in the next two years, and 61% confirm they are actively adopting AI agents today and preparing to implement them at scale ...

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A major architectural shift is underway across enterprise networks, according to a new global study from Cisco. As AI assistants, agents, and data-driven workloads reshape how work gets done, they're creating faster, more dynamic, more latency-sensitive, and more complex network traffic. Combined with the ubiquity of connected devices, 24/7 uptime demands, and intensifying security threats, these shifts are driving infrastructure to adapt and evolve ...

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Cisco

The development of banking apps was supposed to provide users with convenience, control and piece of mind. However, for thousands of Halifax customers recently, a major mobile outage caused the exact opposite, leaving customers unable to check balances, or pay bills, sparking widespread frustration. This wasn't an isolated incident ... So why are these failures still happening? ...

Cyber threats are growing more sophisticated every day, and at their forefront are zero-day vulnerabilities. These elusive security gaps are exploited before a fix becomes available, making them among the most dangerous threats in today's digital landscape ... This guide will explore what these vulnerabilities are, how they work, why they pose such a significant threat, and how modern organizations can stay protected ...

The prevention of data center outages continues to be a strategic priority for data center owners and operators. Infrastructure equipment has improved, but the complexity of modern architectures and evolving external threats presents new risks that operators must actively manage, according to the Data Center Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute ...

As observability engineers, we navigate a sea of telemetry daily. We instrument our applications, configure collectors, and build dashboards, all in pursuit of understanding our complex distributed systems. Yet, amidst this flood of data, a critical question often remains unspoken, or at best, answered by gut feeling: "Is our telemetry actually good?" ... We're inviting you to participate in shaping a foundational element for better observability: the Instrumentation Score ...

We're inching ever closer toward a long-held goal: technology infrastructure that is so automated that it can protect itself. But as IT leaders aggressively employ automation across our enterprises, we need to continuously reassess what AI is ready to manage autonomously and what can not yet be trusted to algorithms ...

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