APM for Development - Unified Monitoring for IT Ops
February 16, 2015

Scott Hollis
Zenoss

Share this

Ensuring application performance is a never ending task that involves multiple products, features and best practices. There is no one process, feature, or product that does everything. A good place to start is pre-production and production monitoring with both an Application Performance Management (APM) tool and a Unified Monitoring tool.

The APM tool will trace/instrument your application and application server activity and often the end user experience via synthetic transactions. The development team and DevOps folks need this.

The Unified Monitoring tool will monitor the supporting infrastructure. The IT Ops team needs this. DevOps likes it too because it helps make IT Ops more effective, which in turn helps assure application delivery.

More Cost Effective

APM tools do not specialize in infrastructure monitoring like unified monitoring solutions do, and unified monitoring solutions do not provide application monitoring depth and diagnostics like the APM tools do. And on top of that, the different audiences need different information.

The best approach is to buy APM for the most critical applications. Most organizations use APM for 10% - 15% of their applications. It is too expensive to buy it for everything. Then for the second tier applications that need some monitoring, they use the unified monitoring solution. It is much less expensive and if you select one with synthetic transaction capability you can get "good enough" end user experience monitoring to know whether or not the application is performing well or not.

Service-Centric is Key

When it comes to unified monitoring, it is important to understand that most unified monitoring vendors provide endpoint monitoring. With endpoint monitoring alone, it is impossible to provide highly accurate root-cause isolation. And they don't identify which service, or application, is impacted. And they can't tell you the extent of the impact. Is it just at risk without impacting application delivery yet OR is it down OR is it somewhere in between?

Be sure the unified monitoring vendor is service-centric and models relationships between components, and that it identifies root-cause; the service or application impacted; and the extent of the impact. This can save hours when there is an outage.

Better yet, by identifying when services are at risk, this can help you to proactively identify and address issues before services/application delivery is impacted.

Scott Hollis is Director of Product Marketing for Zenoss.

Share this

The Latest

November 21, 2024

Broad proliferation of cloud infrastructure combined with continued support for remote workers is driving increased complexity and visibility challenges for network operations teams, according to new research conducted by Dimensional Research and sponsored by Broadcom ...

November 20, 2024

New research from ServiceNow and ThoughtLab reveals that less than 30% of banks feel their transformation efforts are meeting evolving customer digital needs. Additionally, 52% say they must revamp their strategy to counter competition from outside the sector. Adapting to these challenges isn't just about staying competitive — it's about staying in business ...

November 19, 2024

Leaders in the financial services sector are bullish on AI, with 95% of business and IT decision makers saying that AI is a top C-Suite priority, and 96% of respondents believing it provides their business a competitive advantage, according to Riverbed's Global AI and Digital Experience Survey ...

November 18, 2024

SLOs have long been a staple for DevOps teams to monitor the health of their applications and infrastructure ... Now, as digital trends have shifted, more and more teams are looking to adapt this model for the mobile environment. This, however, is not without its challenges ...

November 14, 2024

Modernizing IT infrastructure has become essential for organizations striving to remain competitive. This modernization extends beyond merely upgrading hardware or software; it involves strategically leveraging new technologies like AI and cloud computing to enhance operational efficiency, increase data accessibility, and improve the end-user experience ...

November 13, 2024

AI sure grew fast in popularity, but are AI apps any good? ... If companies are going to keep integrating AI applications into their tech stack at the rate they are, then they need to be aware of AI's limitations. More importantly, they need to evolve their testing regiment ...

November 12, 2024

If you were lucky, you found out about the massive CrowdStrike/Microsoft outage last July by reading about it over coffee. Those less fortunate were awoken hours earlier by frantic calls from work ... Whether you were directly affected or not, there's an important lesson: all organizations should be conducting in-depth reviews of testing and change management ...

November 08, 2024

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 11, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) ...

November 07, 2024

On average, only 48% of digital initiatives enterprise-wide meet or exceed their business outcome targets according to Gartner's annual global survey of CIOs and technology executives ...

November 06, 2024

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping industries around the world. From optimizing business processes to unlocking new levels of innovation, AI is a critical driver of success for modern enterprises. As a result, business leaders — from DevOps engineers to CTOs — are under pressure to incorporate AI into their workflows to stay competitive. But the question isn't whether AI should be adopted — it's how ...