Thursday, January 21, 2010

Solve Application Performance Bottlenecks Before They Affect End Users

Application performance is perhaps the most important aspect for small or mid-sized businesses which depend on applications for their business. Such businesses have fewer resources and need to make the existing ones work well. It is even more important for small businesses to undertake application monitoring so that bottlenecks in applications can be solved before they start affecting end-users. This is one way of ensuring that application performance is up to the par. Some strategies work really well when application performance needs to be improved before it starts affecting end users. The following are some of them:

Real time view of application performance
The first step IT managers need to take for ensuring application performance is have a monitoring tool through which they can analyze traffic, data flow, transaction details etc. This helps in knowing real time performance of applications as well as the network. If IT managers are able to understand the health of the application and the network, they will be able to pinpoint whether application performance problems are because of the network or due to some other issue. This will also enable proactive application monitoring within the organization. Such real time view of performance of applications will help small business owners in ensuring that business critical applications are always performing optimally.

Transaction monitoring
IT managers can help solve application performance bottlenecks quickly if they are monitoring application transactions. Having a detailed look into transactions can help IT managers know exactly what went wrong and solve the problem quickly, before the problem starts affecting end-users. Transaction monitoring also ensures that small businesses can meet the ever-demanding service level agreement conditions.

Real time alerts
Small and mid-sized businesses should consider using monitoring tools which give real time alerts in case of problems within the application. IT managers who want to improve application performance will need the help of a strong application monitoring tool. Through the monitoring tool, IT managers can establish certain thresholds of acceptable service levels. Establishing this threshold of performance is a very important step in ensuring that application monitoring is perfect. When application performance falls below this threshold, a real time alert is generated, which lets the IT team know that application performance is not up to the par. Such real time alerts pertaining to application performance can help the IT manager in identifying and resolving bottlenecks before end users are impacted.

For small and mid-sized businesses to survive in this tough market, it is vital that business-critical applications are monitored for performance and that application performance bottlenecks are solved before end users or business is affected. Business owners can choose from some of the many experienced APM service providers and select a strong application monitoring tool which can help them solve application performance issues before they affect end users.

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.

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Business Service Management: What It Is And How It Benefits Your Business

All types of businesses today are increasingly becoming reliant on their IT infrastructure to deliver their products and services. However, many times, the business owners and IT managers have a tough time in figuring out how the business's IT infrastructure is performing and how it is affecting business at any given point of time. So how can IT managers ensure that they spot the bottlenecks and know exactly how they are affecting business? The answer to that is business service management (BSM). In this post, we discuss what business service management is and how it can benefit a business.

What Business Service Management Is

Business service management is a methodology of monitoring IT services and understanding its impact on business. Through business service management, IT managers can have an idea where the bottlenecks in IT are and how they are affecting business. They can also understand how IT investment, infrastructure and technology are benefiting the business. It is hence an important element of IT service management. IT managers use BSM solutions to ensure that customer deadlines are met and service level agreement conditions are not breached. BSM solutions hence track, monitor, manage and view the investment and operational part of IT to make sure that they are in the interests of business.

What The Benefits Of Business Service Management Are

Business service management is especially useful to businesses which are dependent on their IT department to provide services to their customers. It is also beneficial to larger companies with huge IT departments and a lot of IT infrastructure. A BSM solution is an integral part of effective IT service management for larger companies. With business service management solution in place, if the system fails, a business owner or IT manager will be able to spot where the error has occurred on a real time basis. He/she will also be able to analyze the reason for the failure later on. With such real-time updates, business managers can analyze the financial aspect of downtime and IT managers can ensure that there is no breach in service level agreements.

The many benefits of using business service management are:

  • IT service management becomes easier with a BSM solution
  • Ensures that business-critical applications remain available
  • IT managers can avoid a breach in service level agreement conditions
  • Through business service management, business owners can understand the impact of system failure
  • A business service management solution can help reduce losses and improve productivity in business
  • With business service management, work can be prioritized according to importance
  • A BSM solution helps both business owners and IT managers in figuring out what caused system failure and avoiding such occurrences in the future