The history of application performance management (APM) starts with the World Wide Web. While there were some forms of optimization, testing and acceleration in the pre-Web days, for the most part, APM was born with the need to improve web performance.
Way back in the last millennium (aka, the 1990s), businesses found that their sites and web applications were unable to handle sudden spikes of visitors or any kind of unusual traffic. Because of this, we saw the rise of tools that made it possible to load test web sites before they went live, monitor them during regular usage to detect problems as soon as they occurred, and optimize the servers and code that these websites and applications relied on.
Those of us who created and managed websites in those days remember fondly being able to finally have some way to prevent site crashes before they happened. But web performance management hasn’t gone away. This focus on web application performance continues today and it has become a vital tool for companies looking to ensure that their web-based content, applications, and businesses perform well and provide a good user experience.
The importance of good performance for web applications is also the focus of the new Aberdeen report Reaching the Top of the Web Performance Mountain. In this report we look at how web optimization drives the need for comprehensive performance management and analyze how businesses create a highly optimized web presence.
Jim Rapoza is Senior Research Analyst at Aberdeen Group.
Related Links:
Aberdeen Report: Reaching the Top of the Web Performance Mountain
