Friday, January 8, 2010

Application Monitoring: Some Major Challenges Businesses Face

Application monitoring is a must for all businesses which use IT for business-critical activities. However, businesses face many challenges when it comes to application monitoring. Any down time in applications can directly affect the bottom line of businesses. In order to undertake active monitoring of applications, such challenges need to be identified first. Businesses face some of the following problems while monitoring applications.

Proactive Application Monitoring

Proactive application monitoring help in preventing or solving application bottlenecks before they start affecting end users. However, a certain threshold needs to be set before IT teams can ensure application availability. In case the established threshold is surpassed, the monitoring tool generates a real-time alert. Studying application performance for setting this threshold is a major challenge for almost all businesses. For overcoming this challenge, the IT department needs to determine the number of processes which need constant application monitoring, on basis of which they can set the threshold.

Application Monitoring for Multiple & Complex Applications

If the business has global users, the applications may be very complex because they have to support many locations, languages and cultures. Application monitoring of such complex applications becomes a major challenge for IT departments. Active monitoring of such applications can only be done after understanding the interconnectivity and flow of applications.

Application Monitoring for Shared Applications

Businesses often share applications in order to utilize resources optimally. Application monitoring of a single application is a simple task; however, a shared application creates the complication of constantly tracking logs, memory, disk resources etc. As an example, a single application using a lot of resources could affect the performance of other applications within the organization. Active monitoring of such applications can only be done through an effective application monitoring solution.

Application Monitoring for Clustered Applications

Many business applications are hosted in clustered environments with systems located at separate locations. This creates an application monitoring challenge for tracking failure logs, resources like disk, memory etc. Only by undertaking active monitoring of all the different components can an IT department track which application is causing problems.

A strong application monitoring tool can help overcome all the above-mentioned challenges for business organizations. There are a number of service providers in the market today who can help businesses ensure that service level agreement conditions are met. An experienced APM solution provider offers tools with which IT teams can undertake active monitoring of applications, ensuring end users are not affected by bottlenecks.

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