Feature Articles
In APMdigest's highly popular and well-respected annual list of APM predictions, industry experts - from analysts and consultants to users and the top vendors - offer thoughtful, insightful, and sometimes controversial predictions on how Application Performance Management (APM) will evolve and impact business in 2014 ...
A recent poll on Business Service Reliability found that IT needs to put an increased focus on managing and measuring the customer experience to improve business outcomes ...
Compuware recently commissioned a global CIO survey on the impact of new technologies and trends on the mainframe application environment. The survey found mobile technology is increasing complexity, usage and costs of mainframe applications. As a result, companies are finding it more difficult to isolate and fix problems ...
TRAC's research shows that IT first learns about performance issues when business users bring it to their attention in 37% of cases, and only 41% of organizations have a 50% or better success rate in identifying performance issues before they impact business users. Some key reasons why the prevention of performance problems is still a major issue for organizations include ...
Successful enterprise mobility deployment goes beyond supporting Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), and requires specific strategies targeted at balanced servicing of customer, IT and employee needs, according to a new global study, TechInsights Report: Enterprise Mobility–It’s All About the Apps ...
With the holidays rapidly approaching, the top goal of many online retailers and e-commerce companies is delivering superior online experiences that drive conversions. This should come as no surprise, with eMarketer predicting United States e-commerce revenues to increase about 15.1 percent year-over-year during the prime holiday shopping months of November and December. Here are the top five must-have e-commerce features that can help you grow your business this holiday season ...
In 2013, TRAC Research completed studies in five major areas of coverage which includes insights from 2,000+ organizations. Some of the technologies covered in this research include: application performance monitoring; network performance monitoring; Web and user experience monitoring and testing; systems management. This research resulted in more than 1,000 unique data points collected. Here is a summary of some of the key trends identified ...
In this era of unprecedented complexity, it's virtually impossible for a modern website to eliminate all the risk associated with using third parties. However, there are proactive strategies an organization can implement to better manage and minimize their risk ...
What is the cost of downtime? The answer obviously depends on various factors such as the size of an organization, the industry, the duration of the outage and the number of people impacted. To provide a ballpark, though, the Uptime Institute Symposium estimates an average cost of $5,600 per minute. And it's not all about dollars and cents. Reputation, customer retention, employee satisfaction and overall confidence can be shaken by even a short outage ...
In the "Age of the Customer", only organizations that focus first and foremost on winning, serving, and retaining customers will survive, according to Forrester. This era will define the next 20 years of business ...
According to a new study of global CIOs and IT decision makers, bandwidth requirements and network spending are both increasing. Simultaneously, application problems are also on the rise. Taken together, these results suggest that throwing more bandwidth and more funds at network management isn't working ...
Today’s mobile-connected consumers have more power of choice than ever before and a digital loudspeaker with which to make their voices heard. And they have four big demands: newer, faster, cheaper, and better. For these reasons, application development is at the core of delivering the kind of enhanced customer experience and brand loyalty that can set a business apart from the competition and increase sales ...
Today, no application is a standalone and in reality is very likely a composition of multiple applications running on different virtual servers to provide a function. This function can be composed of 10 different applications. All these applications together provide a service, and it is the performance and availability of that service that the business cares about. This distinction is so important that it deserves a new name. I call it "Service Performance Management" as opposed to Application Performance Management ...
It is so difficult to effectively manage application performance that a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Riverbed found of 159 IT professionals with direct responsibility for business-critical applications, 54 percent of those surveyed are unable to resolve more than 25 percent of their problems in less than 24 hours. And 31 percent have experienced issues that persist for a month or more ...
Setting up a network or application monitoring system involves creating alerts for critical parameters that need attention. Alerts are an integral part of monitoring and they should be easily understandable, provide actionable knowledge and should not make excessive noise. For an alert to be valuable to the user and meet those criteria, the right set of thresholds is essential. That really is the question then: How do you find the right threshold values for your alerts ...
Some companies have turned to automation to lower costs and increase efficiency, but the increasing number of distributed, virtual and cloud-based applications pose a unique challenge for APM as processes quickly become outdated and insufficient. And to make matters worse, the complexity of application delivery environments is outstripping the ability of APM products to monitor and manage performance ...
Virtualization has answered the call for controlling the rising tide of IT infrastructure costs, allowing IT to make changes and deploy new applications or updates more easily and quickly than ever before. Yet the benefits of pervasive virtualization and tiered virtual infrastructure come with some harsh realities ...
There’s a new, third wave of smarter, more sophisticated analytics hitting the APM market; these solutions are designed to help shorten the duration of outages and possibly prevent them by giving application operators earlier warnings of problems brewing beneath the surface ...
A survey by Research in Action determined cloud computing to be the top IT investment priority for 2013. No surprises there, as clearly these professionals are being driven by the promised benefits of greater agility, flexibility and time-to-value. What is surprising is the fact that 79 percent of these professionals expressed concern over the hidden costs of cloud computing, with poor end-user experience resonating as the biggest management worry ...
This is quite possibly the most important list we have posted on APMdigest. The bottom-line business benefits are what APM is really all about, or should be all about, although the market can forget this at times. But the reality is that no company should be deploying Application Performance Management unless they are using it to drive bottom-line business benefits such as those on this list. The benefits on this list are the payoff, the end result, the ultimate reason for APM ...
THINKstrategies conducted a recent survey to determine how Cloud Computing alternatives are affecting the IT Service and Client Management needs of organizations. While the vast majority of respondents are deploying on-premise Service and Client Management solutions, the tide is shifting to cloud-based implementations. And this raises big questions about the pros and cons of multi-tenant vs. single tenant cloud architectures that are increasingly relied upon to deliver Service and Client Management solutions ranging from running help desks and change management requests, to incident response processes, service catalogs and, in some cases, ITIL best practices ...
The data deluge has brought renewed focus on an old problem: the enormous performance gap that exists in input/output (I/O) between a server’s memory and its storage. I/O typically takes a mere 100 nanoseconds for information stored in the server’s memory, while I/O to a hard disk drive (HDD) takes about 10 milliseconds — a difference of five orders of magnitude that is having a profound adverse impact on application performance ...
In mobile, APM has taken on new and critical importance. With mobile apps becoming increasingly vital to a business’ overall performance, it is important to manage and improve — not just measure — application performance. The following guidelines will arm IT leaders with the necessary steps to finding the right mobile app performance management solution for 100% success ...
Gartner's second annual Cool Vendors in APM report, authored by Jonah Kowall and Will Cappelli, covers companies that support the expanding landscape of APM, which is "not confined to views from the data center network alone, but also includes the Internet and mobile carrier networks" ...
It’s a fact that online businesses lose out on revenue when customers abandon their transactions due to website performance problems. We learned this lesson first hand at Thomas Cook Online, but we also learned that with a performance monitoring solution that scrutinizes customer experience, we could not only improve the performance of our website but also recapture lost business ...
