The APM Blog
Once again, EMA finds itself in a situation where how we cover critical “hot topics” becomes an exercise in acronymic disarray. In this case the culprits are Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), Service Lifecycle Management (the other SLM) and the now notorious “DevOps”. The three weave a stream of sometimes complementary, sometimes conflicting insights into what is primarily a schizophrenic situation for IT organizations ...
Yelp, TripAdvisor and other review sites are making huge waves in the markets for local business, hotels, and other consumer products. It's clear that this online review revolution is expanding from the consumer world to the business world ...
Ask any IT or business manager what type of information would make their lives easier and they'll usually say benchmark data which allows them to compare their performance to their peers ...
Four of today's hottest technologies represent the most powerful drivers for the evolution of Application Management software that we've seen in the last decade: Cloud, Integration, Mobile, and Big Data. Each of these topics is changing the game in terms of application delivery, and generating significant performance and availability risks along the way ...
Can Event management help foster a curiosity for innovative possibilities to make application performance better? Blue-sky thinkers may not want to deal with the myriad of details on how to manage the events being generated operationally, but could learn something from this exercise ...
Using the term "Chargeback" to describe what's becoming an increasingly critical and multi-dimensional service management capability has always seemed to me like it's missing the point ...
The recent outage of the Amazon EC2 cloud led to disruption of service for Netflix, Instagram and other major site and applications. Last year after the first major Amazon outage I posted on this site a blog post: After Amazon: 5 Ways BSM Can Protect You from the Next Cloud Outage. The points are worth repeating since we see that cloud computing is not a guarantee of better application performance ...
The recent cloud service outages at Amazon and Salesforce.com grabbed the industry’s attention because of the broad customer impact caused by the outages, and the high visibility of both cloud service providers ... The real value of unfortunate events like these is the opportunity they provide to learn from them ...
The real obstacle to application optimization isn't technological, it is organizational. Application performance depends on two fundamental elements: application design and network configuration. Unfortunately, in too many organizations these two elements are responsibility of two separate and sometimes competing groups -- the application development and network operations teams ...
Last Fall, I wrote two blogs on BSM Analytics: What Are They? And Why Should You Care? This Summer I’m taking that idea several giant steps forward and developing what at EMA we call a “Radar” – our equivalent I suppose to a “Magic Quadrant” – to look at advanced performance analytics in context with vendor designs, deployment successes and use-case related strengths and weaknesses ...
I was struck by the title of a recent blog post, Customer as Enemy, by Gartner Research Director Aneel Lakhani ...
We have recently been involved in a mobile telecom company in the Far East. The Board's biggest issue is to grow its revenue by selling data packages. And at first glance this may not seem an obvious problem to solve using application performance management but let me explain how ...
Back in March I wrote a blog entitled "The Many Dimensions of User Experience Management", in which I suggested that UEM was not in any way just a subset of APM or application performance management, but part of a larger continuum inclusive of business impact, user productivity and even portfolio planning ...
There is a trend towards Cloud and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) offerings for Service Management tools ... One of the key advantages outlined by the tools vendors is the ability to get the software up and running in a matter of days or weeks, which is definitely attractive to those who normally experience projects which take 6-12 months to do this ...
This blog is the corollary to The Anatomy of APM which outlines four foundational elements of a successful APM strategy: Top Down Monitoring, Bottom Up Monitoring, Reporting, and Incident Management. Here I provide a deeper context on how the event-to-incident flow is structured ...
My latest research found that only about 65% of "commercial enterprise management products" purchased are currently in use -- the rest are languishing on a shelf somewhere, just waiting to be dusted off and deployed. Here are a few tips to ensure that your purchases don't end up in a back room collecting dust ...
On May 8, 2012, EMA announced that it was combining my Business Service Management practice with Julie Craig’s Application Management practice – into the newly unified practice area Application and Business Services ...
When rolling out an Application Performance Management (APM) solution, selection of your Manager of Managers (MoM) and how it will support the overall solution is critical ...
If you're an IT executive trying to take control of your environment and optimize it for business outcomes — you're likely to be getting a lot of advice from a wide range of glib sources, and very little actual support ...
The typical procurement approach, reducing everything down to a common level so they can compare "apples with apples", is very understandable because it makes selection easier. But this approach runs the risk of killing any opportunity for innovation ...
