APMdigest continues the list, cataloging the many valuable tools available – beyond what is technically categorized as Application Performance Management (APM) – to support the goals of improving application performance and business service.
6. Synthetic Monitoring
Understanding Web and mobile app performance starts with the end-user experience, no matter how and when a customer accesses the application. And while today's IT departments are facing enormous pressure to deliver a flawless end-user experience, they must also drive down costs. These competing forces create a compelling case for adding a synthetic-transaction SaaS solution to the APM mix. IT pros responsible for application performance can understand the health and availability of key applications, and track global and local end-user experience, with a cost-effective, easy-to-use and fast-to-implement solution.
Aruna Ravichandran
VP Product and Solution Marketing, APM and DevOps, CA Technologies
Active, or synthetic, monitoring of applications, services, and websites 24/7 is an essential component of an enterprise-wide APM strategy. It ensures that online properties are fast and reliable for end users, helping to protect brand image and drive revenue. While passive monitoring provides a view into end user experience, it cannot detect downtime or get a full picture of what end users see outside of your datacenter(s) or cloud.
Mehdi Daoudi
CEO and Founder, Catchpoint
7. Infrastructure Monitoring
While APM solutions and corresponding strategy is critical for modern enterprises it's essential to also adopt an appropriate infrastructure monitoring solution. Applications sit on top of increasingly complex infrastructure workloads (server, network, storage) brought about by innovations in areas cloud architecture, mobile and non-relational data stores. This means that a unified infrastructure monitoring solution that is able to cover these areas is an essential component of a strategic monitoring strategy.
John Rakowski
Analyst, Infrastructure and Operations, Forrester Research
While APM provides great insight into service delivery from a user perspective, it alone isn't sufficient to properly identify and resolve performance or availability issues pertaining to the back-end infrastructure. Service-centric unified monitoring tools are the key to ensuring the health of applications and all the infrastructure components needed for consistent and reliable delivery of the service.
Deepak Kanwar
Senior Manager, Zenoss
8. Load Testing
APM is a cornerstone of delivering a quality user experience. To supplement the 360 degree view of your APM solution it is important to also implement and obtain correlation between your APM and Load Testing solutions. This combination provides a clear perspective of your application and your application environment, allowing you to use load to help predict application performance prior to seeing real life behavior through your APM solution.
Denis Goodwin
Director of Product Management, AlertSite by SmartBear
Among the thousands of product reviews by real users on IT Central Station – aka the "Yelp for IT" – we find numerous cross-references between APM and testing tools. Our community of IT professionals evidently find that investment in testing tools is complimentary to APM.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station
9. Log Management
While APM tools are definitely widely used for a view into how your own application code is performing, in many cases APM alone is not enough to give an end-to-end perspective of your system - especially in cloud environments where you no longer have the same level of access and it can be more difficult to apply instrumentation. We are seeing a huge increase in users sending more and more performance metrics into their log data – giving them the ability to use "logs as data" along side their APM tools, and providing deeper log-level insights into key business metrics.
Trevor Parsons, Phd
Co-founder & Chief Scientist, Logentries
Combining unified monitoring with log analysis provides faster trouble-shooting, improved root cause analysis, and more effective IT event correlation and forensic analysis.
David Dennis
VP of Marketing & Business Development, GroundWork
10. Middleware Management
Middleware Infrastructure Visibility is a necessity for application and business service performance. Enterprise applications are inherently complex and built on a combination of technologies including middleware systems (e.g., WebSphere MQ, IBM Data Power, TIBCO, and Oracle BPEL), packaged applications, and other legacy technologies. Middleware, in particular, serves as the plumbing connecting a multitude of heterogeneous systems. In this way, middleware management complements traditional APM offerings because it provides deep visibility into the infrastructure these applications depend on to deliver data and business services.
April Hickel
Product Manager, APM, BMC Software