Tuesday, August 18, 2009

4 Features To Look For In Your Application Performance Management Solution

An application performance management solution is required when a business has critical aspects being handled by applications at the back end. Even a small glitch in important applications can result in a downtime, which can affect bottom lines of a business. Thus an application performance management solution is a must for businesses which use applications for service support. There is a confusing array of APM solutions available in the market today and selecting the appropriate one is a tough task. Mentioned below are 4 features in an APM solution must have in order to effectively undertake application monitoring.


  1. Capable of monitoring end user experience
  2. End user monitoring tools help in judging application performance. Such tools do not require any installation and are a simple plug and play solution. In the event of your end user monitoring tool showing any latency, the application performance management tool needs to be able to spot them. Only if your APM solution is able to monitor end user experience effectively, will you be able to solve the problem. Such an application performance management tool should also be affordable for your business.


  3. Help in management of the data center
  4. Applications being used by businesses today are complex, interdependent and scattered, which creates a requirement for data center management. Application performance can only be judged through an APM solution which enables data center management. The data center as a whole needs to be taken into consideration if the application performance management solution has to solve the problem. But due to the fact that data center management tools use information of softwares of server management from various tiers, there is a lot of resource consumption metrics which will not make a connection of application performance and what the end user experiences. In such cases, if the end users are not monitored, problems will come to the fore only in case users call up the service desk to complain.


  5. Capability in monitoring network performance
  6. Monitoring of network performance is also an integral part of application performance management. This is because if the latencies being shown in the applications do not match with end user experience, the APM solution will not be effective. Effective application monitoring can be done only if the APM solution monitors network performance.


  7. Business transaction management
  8. In order to cover all the important issues given above, each business transaction within the organization needs to be monitored. This means that each and every transaction right from the end user to the network to the data center needs to be monitored. This process is called Business Transaction Management.

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