Is Critical Application Performance Keeping You Up at Night? Know the "Score" and Get Some Rest

There’s been lots of talk about Business Intelligence (BI) and the use of predictive analytics in analyzing Big Data for the purpose of identifying long-term business trends. But what hasn’t been talked about is the emergence of predictive analytics for IT as it relates to solving critical application performance problems created by virtualization and the proliferation of IT and application monitoring tools.

Since business objectives are typically tied directly to the constantly changing performance of revenue generating applications and services, CTOs, application owners, and line-of-business owners are constantly asking:

- How are my critical business services and their underlying systems performing right now?

- How is this performance impacting our customer’s experience?

- What does this mean for our business?

At the heart of the problem is the fact that conventional monitoring tools were never designed to provide a holistic analysis of how application performance may be impacted by IT performance and business metrics in other parts of the environment. Instead they generate more performance data, graphs and meters than anyone can interpret, let alone use. And they fail to correlate and present all this information in a way that helps you understand the current state of your business.

But a solution is emerging. Tested and deployed by some of the world’s largest banks and telcos, self-learning, predictive analytics software is powered by what Gartner refers to as Behavior Learning technology. Using advanced mathematics and statistical analysis, it self-learns and continuously adapts as it correlates an organizations current user or customer experience, underlying IT infrastructure and the most relevant business metrics to provide a composite view of the applications’ “health.”

Presented as a single application health score number, it is the easy-to-understand holistic view that has long been coveted for critical, revenue generating applications and services. The higher the number, the healthier the application, the better the user or customer experience, and the better the business is performing (see image below).

More importantly, this dynamic, real-time application performance scorecard enables administrators and service delivery managers to detect IT and application anomalies as leading indicators of impending problems before they cascade into service degradation and/or outages.

The approach is being adopted by large organizations with expansive IT environments supporting mission critical applications such as online banking, global payments, retail commerce, and global messaging platforms.

Graham Gillen is Senior Product Marketing Manager for Netuitive.

Related Links:

To learn more, check out this white paper on how predictive IT analytics is used to assure service performance and availability of global payments systems for a major bank..

www.netuitive.com