Feature Articles
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 ...
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 ...
