Application performance monitoring is done as much to ensure optimal performance, as to ensure service assurance. At a time when customers take to social media to air grievances, ensuring application performance is critical for businesses. Fortunately, timely monitoring can help ensure optimal application performance.
Several elements form the basis for successful application performance, especially in customer-centric businesses.
- Effective operations, keeping in mind the customer experience
- Effective management of the customer experience of the application and its performance
- Timely troubleshooting as and when needed
- Simplify your own IT management and help you streamline the function, with the least amount of hassles and low costs
How well your applications perform, and what is their contribution to the user experience will play a huge role in determining the trust your customers place in your business. Thus, application performance automatically impacts business and profitability.
How to ensure service assurance?
Choosing a performance monitoring tool for your applications can be one of the first steps. Comprehensive and real-time monitoring could help you keep track of the way in which your applications are performing. Monitor and watch out for the following factors:
- Complexity: Too much complexity can be troublesome. However, in case it cannot be helped, your monitoring tool needs to be able to cut through all of it to be able to review comprehensively and also spot hidden issues
- Reporting: To be totally effective, monitoring tools need to be able to spot the issue, analyze it, and be able to report on it. The reporting should be timely; it needs you to be able to resolve it and firefight, if needed
- A comprehensive monitoring tool will allow you adequate time to resolve the problem before it reaches shut-down stage
Transaction monitoring takes importance in the face of compliance with service terms and business delivery matters. Without timely tracking, it is difficult to gauge whether transactions are meeting business needs or not. Depending on the application, transaction monitoring could be closely tied-in with end-user expectations and ultimately, customer loyalty.
How does regular transaction monitoring help?
Ideally, transaction monitoring should be comprehensive, covering all aspects of application function and operations. When done proactively, transaction monitoring allows for several advantages including:
- Discovering issues related to transactions before they snowball into major problems
- Being able to raise alarms and alerts effectively, pointing to the cause of the issue, so it can be nailed effectively
- Depending on your application and if you choose a comprehensive transaction monitoring tool, it can review transactions across your entire IT infrastructure
- Transaction monitoring can also help pinpoint problem to the exact technical level where they are appearing
- You can also configure your monitoring tool to provide you with specific information; this can be facilitated with the help of a dashboard
Benefits of regular transaction monitoring
- Improves real time experience and availability- preventz accidents and unexpected problems and outages
- Increases detection of unaccounted for or 'missing' transactions
- Improves time taken in resolving issues
- Ensures compliance with defined terms and conditions
- Reduces costs measurably; through timely detection of problems
If your business is associated with finance, you must have transaction monitoring in place to prevent crimes and fraud. Regular transaction monitoring can also become part of your risk management solutions.
Service level agreement is not so technical as it may seem; it can actually help boost end-user or even customer satisfaction through ensuring compliance of the terms and conditions that have been determined for services provided by the IT department.
On a larger scale, service level agreements are good indicators of the performance of your system. These agreements can also help you figure out if the services being provided are in compliance with requirements. If the requirements are set or determined in consonance with the business development team, then your service level agreement can help facilitate loyalty of your customers through ensuring their needs are met.
Ensuring service level agreement (SLA) directives are met can result in several advantages, including:
> Defining and outlining expected standards of service; both from the side of the vendor, and that of the customer
> Ensuring and measuring compliance of IT services being provided
> Help define benchmarks and quality standards
> Help define process and implementation better
> Setting clear rules and making expectations easier to understand
> Helps goal-setting
Application performance monitoring and the SLA
Your application monitoring tool can help you monitor service level agreement compliance. Some tools will also provide service level reporting, which in turn can help you monitor service level agreement compliance. One of the advantages of choosing a tool that can help monitor SLA compliance is that it will ensure your systems run smoothly and with lesser disruptions. Some tools also have reporting levels to align the customer's perspective with IT goals and deliverables. These tools not only monitor individual components and services, they also help address the need to enforce the SLA directives.
A service level agreement need not be taken as a proverbial sword hanging over the heads of the IT personnel. Judiciously used, it works as an effective means of communicating expectations from the customer perspective to those in charge of managing the technical details.
The ideal performance testing tool
Service level agreements can also help ensure regular review and maintenance so that bugs are caught before they have caused severe damage. Service level reporting can prove to be extremely useful when it generates the necessary results in the stipulated time frame. Alerts are a necessary component of reporting as they bring to notice issues and problems, thus initiating troubleshooting wherever needed. Comprehensive performance testing tools approach the need for a service level agreement to be implemented across an organization. An SLA that is implemented across all of the systems in a business helps implement consistent performance and ensure smoother operations across the organization. Further, you can choose advanced options that allow you to test applications in a manner similar to that of an end user. This includes testing transaction time, response time, other factors such as ease of access, etc.
About the Author:
Tevron develops and delivers Application Monitoring Solutions, Service Level Agreement, IT Service Management, and end to end performance monitoring system available globally. Tevron has also successfully delivered enterprise Application Monitoring Solutions and Testing solutions to support every IT enterprise application to hundreds of customers across the globe. Tevron's solutions designed to support diverse environments, business processes and applications with a service oriented management.
