The ability to quickly respond to changes without losing focus or momentum is becoming a goal for businesses of all sizes, across all industries and markets. Business agility is often the sign of a well-run, and likely profitable, company. Achieving this goal means the company has successfully leveraged business-critical technology to increase their productivity and ensure the business is running at an optimal level.

With an emphasis on the application as the enabler of business agility, end-to-end visibility of the application performance has become critical. For example, the importance of something such as finding the source of performance delays, and correcting those delays with minimal to no impact on the end user experience, cannot be underestimated in achieving and maintaining business agility.

By taking advantage of performance monitoring, IT and business decision makers can gain better visibility into their cloud and application performance. Dedicated performance monitoring has become essential for providing visibility into all areas of application performance and keeping all aspects of the business running optimally. It also provides decision makers with insight into the entire application development and delivery process which includes a valuable understanding of how to manage resources and deadlines so that efficiencies can be exploited and costs mitigated.

Let's Get Visible, Visible!

An increased usage of cloud technologies is a great way to rein in costs associated with application development and real-time production environments. A move to the cloud offers many welcomed outcomes, including cost savings and efficiency improvements, but does not come without its fair share of challenges.

As the apps themselves are becoming increasingly more complex, data sources are becoming far more diverse and disparate. Users have come to expect low to no-latency and 24/7 availability. Additionally, the delivery chain that produces and supports these apps has radically shifted with the increasing adoption of DevOps processes, which while fostering communication and collaboration, has massively disrupted traditional development and operations groups.

The right performance monitoring solution offers a clear understanding of the behavior from the systems that support the application to the end-user experience. For executives and upper-level management that oversee performance management, visibility of this breadth and depth provides multiple benefits including a greater level of business agility, the ability to become a competitive differentiator for the business, as well as added attention to application development and production by IT; all of which will allow for stronger performance management processes and policies to be implemented, thus increasing collaboration across all lines of business. These are benefits any executive or manager would be happy to achieve individually, but a comprehensive view into performance management can provide visibility that helps to serve the whole business.

I Love IT When a Plan Comes Together

The IT and development organization can become the true heroes of a cloud-first business strategy. A modern development team is closest to the technology of a company giving IT the opportunity to have far greater visibility into the infrastructure, network, application, end-user experience and the effects of any modifications made to these areas.

From a development standpoint, embracing cloud technologies can be transformative and adopting a comprehensive performance monitoring strategy for these technologies can provide many valuable benefits:

■ Having a clear understanding of performance during the development process allows teams to meet application timelines and reduce issues.

■ Quick and proactive problem resolution allows for increased availability and reductions to both resolution timelines and negative user experience.

Greater visibility into the performance of all areas of cloud-based technologies can allow for business agility through strong support from both the management and IT organizational layers making success far more achievable.