Feature Articles
DevOps emerged as a philosophy for bridging the gap between operations and development silos, where each focused on different priorities, using different processes and tools. This article will focus on some key challenges existing in the DevOps approach — challenges that leave operations to wade through overwhelming amounts of operational data — and how new analytics-based tools stand to provide insight into meaningful information, ultimately closing this gap, and putting development and operations into better synch ...
While the majority of IT professionals are confident in their ability to respond to the needs of the business, almost a third still equated the visibility of their IT department into their company's business initiatives to a foggy day in London, according to the 2013 Cisco Global IT Impact Survey ...
The more effectively we can integrate management tools at every level and the more effectively we can manage the delivery of IT as a service to our constituents, the more value we add to the enterprise and its mission. At the same time, the further we enlarge those circles to encompass and integrate infrastructures that were previously disconnected, the greater the number of elements we need to incorporate, monitor and manage. We need something that ties all these disparate pieces together. That’s where the configuration management database (CMDB) fits in ...
While mobile is quickly becoming the de-facto market platform for many of the business-critical applications deployed by banks, insurance companies and other enterprise organizations, the need to ensure an optimal end user experience mandates a robust mobile performance testing environment. Building an efficient mobile performance test strategy should consist of the following five pillars ...
What if your mission-critical app is not designed to last? What if your app is perishable with a shelf life of only a few hours or days? With these apps, traditional monitoring and remediation become irrelevant. The app will expire before it can be fixed. But, that doesn't mean that perishable apps are fated to be poor performing and unsatisfying. Proper planning, testing, and additional resources can keep your perishable apps from going bad ...
What is it that drives the need for Application Performance Management? What are the main factors that can negatively impact application performance? What should you be looking out for? That is what this new APMdigest list reveals ...
When you think about it, we’re not just focusing on application and network performance solely for the sake of performance. In today’s business environment, we’re focusing on performance because IT has become a service — and ultimately, we are the ones in charge of the delivery of that service. Given that reality, does it make any sense to treat IT operations management and IT service management as distinct and separate activities? I submit that it does not ...
Blamestorming is a well-known game IT organizations spend hours playing every week. The goal of the game is to figure out the origin of an IT service degradation issue and collectively identify the one person — or the team — to blame ...
Software defined networking (SDN) is creating a lot of excitement in data centers, but current technology is still relatively immature. Joe Skorupa, VP and distinguished analyst at Gartner, explains that SDN is not only limited to data center and service provider networks ...
It’s not just the network infrastructure that IT teams need to consider; it’s not even the increasingly complex application infrastructure that stands between the physical network infrastructure and the users. The challenge today involves the effective management of both these infrastructures as well the interplay between them — and it’s the interplay between them that poses the greatest challenge. Application-aware network performance management tools can help you overcome that challenge ...
The following are five interesting findings from TRAC Research's APM Spectrum report, based on more than 400 survey participants and more than 120 live interviews ...
Application Performance Management, as defined by the industry, is focused on monitoring — because you can’t manage what you can’t see. But, there are other functions involved in managing application performance ...
For many of us in the application or software development industry, APM was supposed to be a magic bullet, a way to catch the occasional unforeseen mistake that slipped through to production releases. In reality, even with APM tools reporting production issues, there has been no discernable increase in the quality of applications delivered ...
What’s the real value of Social IT? Will this just be a flash in the pan until we move on to the next claimed “breakthrough”? In other words, is Social IT really worth it such that it will actually stick around and become part of the fabric of how we manage IT as a discipline?
The IT world is rapidly evolving. Companies should review and evaluate 2012 challenges so they can be planned for and managed in 2013 ...
More than half of senior IT operations executives are dissatisfied with their APM solutions, and 75% are dissatisfied with their BSM solutions, according to a new BlueStripe survey of Fortune 500 companies ...
Smart businesses are always looking for ways to be more productive and cost effective by leveraging industry trends. Serena surveyed IT professionals and business executives in late 2012 on what they viewed as their top IT priorities for 2013. You may be surprised at the results ...
In a recent survey of 300 application developers, conducted by Boundary, we found that nearly 60 percent of participants had been affected by a Cloud outage. Around 72 percent of participants experienced significant costs from Cloud performance issues: thousands of dollars per incident and/or in excess of $100 per minute of downtime. This isn't stopping companies from moving to the Cloud, of course. The same survey found that 67% of developers say that their company is hosting “business-impacting” applications in the public Cloud ...
Without the capability to manage the performance lifecycle between the Cloud – whether public, private or hybrid – and the consumers of business critical applications and services, it is not possible to understand (let alone guarantee) necessary application service levels from the user’s perspective. This presents many challenges ...
A recent survey of IT Operations executives found the following to be the most impactful challenges facing their teams ...
As with any shiny new technology that changes the world in a rush, BYOD has produced a growing problem for IT managers. Few organizations believe they have an adequate BYOD management plan and it’s further compounded by the ever-increasing MDM problem that had already been an issue for some time ...
As the technology services director of JMC IT, I have first hand experience transforming our company from typically reactive to a proactive, full-service MSP. Here are three lessons I learned throughout the implementation process ...
Windows 8 represents the very latest in application development and deployment architecture from Microsoft, allowing today’s developers to showcase their applications on a new and modern platform. But how will it change APM?
Most security reference architectures rely on the old methods to get warnings about security issues such as use of a SIEM and a log analysis tool to interpret what is in the SIEM. However, there is a richer set of more immediate data that can help us with the problem of security notifications: APM Data ...
Industry experts - from analysts and consultants to users and the top vendors - offer thoughtful, insightful, and sometimes controversial and contradictory predictions on how APM will change and impact business in 2013 ...
