Feature Articles
On Tuesday, January 21, one of the biggest outages in history — if not the world's largest outage — happened to the Internet in China. The web was essentially unavailable for one of the strongest and fastest growing economies for one full business day. The China example highlights how that reliance on third-party services comes with the downside of increased vulnerability and fragility. In this era of increased interdependency, what can an organization do to better protect and insulate its web performance?
How high are mobile user's expectations? According to this new SmartBear research, 50% of mobile consumers will delete a mobile app after encountering a single bug. One bug could lose a customer forever – and maybe a few of their friends! More than a third of consumers will report a bug on a public forum, to the app provider or to their peers. For app developers and testers, this is a dangerous statistic ...
The Sochi Winter Olympics are officially underway, and NBC will once again be providing viewers access to live streaming in a multitude of mediums. As NBC makes it easier and easier to bring the Olympics viewing experience to the office, are network operations staff prepared for the potential bandwidth onslaught?
The Enterprise IT support center has become a feature of almost every enterprise, but it is becoming commoditized and may be displaced by external service providers unless it can justify its existence ...
Moving your applications to the cloud has undeniable benefits. But when things go wrong, it's hard to know where the bottlenecks are. Here are four best practices to optimize your application performance monitoring ...
The first step in making any system more automatic (and thus more reliable) is to dramatically reduce the amount of manual maintenance required ...
The Configuration Management Database, or CMDB, was conceived a few years back as a way to discover and maintain a repository of all components on which an application is dependent, along with information about their relationships. The thought was that combining the CMDB with real-time monitoring metrics obtained from the underlying components could provide insight into the health state of complex applications, with early warning of incipient problems, and guidance to root cause when incidents do occur. Sounds like a really great idea. Why then, has the CMDB seen only limited adoption and little commercial success?
HealthCare.gov was possibly the world's most important IT project of the moment, yet it performed as if it were rolled out the door without so much as a cursory kick of the tires. That's because it probably was – and that's far from unusual. A recent LinkedIn/Empirix survey found that at most companies and public agencies, pre-deployment testing is half-hearted at best and non-existent at worst ...
Interested in what everyone else is reading? The following is a list of the top articles and blogs - in terms of views - on APMdigest for 2013 ...
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 ...
