Vendor Forum
While exhibiting with the SmartBear AlertSite UXM team in Velocity last week, I managed to skip away from the booth quite a bit to squeeze in as many sessions as possible. The more sessions I attended, the more some common themes started materializing. The three themes that finally emerged are all very different, but are ultimately all related at the end of the day ...
Through offering enterprises greater efficiency, connectedness and flexibility, Unified Communications (UC) software has become one of the most readily adopted technologies of the past five years. However, the allure of connectedness and high definition video-conferencing technology comes at the cost of huge strain on the business network, often to the extent that many networks are simply not equipped to deal with the demands ...
"Leaders" who are investing in new innovation and development capabilities are growing revenue at more than twice the rate of "Laggards", creating an Application Divide in the marketplace, according to a global study commissioned by CA Technologies entitled How to Survive and Thrive in the Application Economy ...
Among the most embarrassing situations for application support teams is first hearing about a critical performance issue from their users. With technology getting increasingly complex and IT environments changing almost overnight, the reality is that even the most experienced support teams are bound to miss a major problem with a critical application or service. One of the contributing factors is their continued reliance on traditional monitoring approaches ...
While Application Performance Management (APM) is a vital tool to ensure application availability and performance, analysis of log data can augment APM to monitor, manage and optimize application performance. From infrastructure, OS and web logs to home grown application logs and 3rd party software logs, you can extract valuable insights – using log analysis technology – that will help you better understand, measure and support your APM strategy. The following are 5 ways log analysis can deliver results beyond APM tools ...
Fragmented approaches to APM are being promoted as solutions to support the DevOps ideal of continuous integration and delivery, but the stark lack of integrated tools in these APM arsenals isn’t likely to make communication and collaboration between dev and ops any easier or more efficient ...
While the application is now the heart of businesses of all sizes and its performance is the lifeblood of success, IT continues to struggle to ensure its performance and availability, according to a new survey by SolarWinds ...
Today's common “hybrid” IT environment of legacy plus cloud plus custom is a pretty chaotic mash-up that is tough to manage, to say the least. One of the most difficult aspects, according to anecdotal evidence uncovered in our discussions with senior IT executives, is proactive visibility and control at the application level. Despite investments in tools and processes that are supposed to enable proactive and preventative support, senior IT executives say their day-to-day mode still tends to be crisis-driven and reactive. Additional layers of anecdotal or incidental feedback as well as “optical” or subjective input contribute to the reactivity ...
In order to properly manage your applications and user experience you need to start with monitoring them. Application monitoring is evolving — from its beginnings of simply pinging a server to see if it is up, to new, more sophisticated techniques which monitor every detail of a user interaction. How do you decide what techniques to use, should you abandon old methods for new? There are two main techniques used to monitor applications: Synthetic monitoring, also called directed monitoring, and Real monitoring, also called passive monitoring. What’s the difference between Synthetic monitoring and real application monitoring? ...
Enterprise content management applications were once viewed as “backend” systems that were primarily focused on archival or records management processes. However, their role in organizations have grown and evolved. A recent survey executed by AIIM and Reveille shows that 80% agree their content systems are now just as critical to their business operations as transactional systems. However, according to the same survey, the majority of respondents (57%) said they had nowhere near the same performance information about the content systems as they do for their transactional systems. Why the disconnect? What can be done to fix this? ...
With the increasing proliferation of cloud-based applications and services, IT has to deal with newer management challenges such as high support costs and slow performance of applications. Almost 53% of IT professionals say that the biggest challenge with managing cloud services is troubleshooting or root cause analysis taking too long. To meet these new application management challenges, businesses need to use "cloud-ready" monitoring solutions that help pinpoint the actual problem and help reduce troubleshooting time. See the ManageEngine-EMA infographic for more interesting facts and figures ...
The good news - Cloud apps and services continue to gain traction in enterprises with both business users and IT departments. The bad - Big obstacles still remain including a lack of confidence about service performance and availability, a lack of management tools and continuing concerns about data security. These observations come from a recent survey of over 200 business executives and IT managers in North America to better understand their current and planned use of cloud-based applications and services, the drivers behind cloud adoption, and the obstacles that stand in their way. What may be surprising to the readers of APMdigest is the concern over cloud app performance and availability and the lack of good cloud management tools ...
CDNs offer cost effective and easy to deploy solutions for accelerating website delivery to different regions around the world. An inter-connected network of servers, strategically placed in high traffic regions around the world, ensures faster web content delivery and minimizes load time. Let’s take a closer look at the five primary benefits of leveraging CDN services/solutions ...
As part of our work on the AppPulse Mobile project, we have been digging into hundreds of user comments for many mobile apps, trying to understand what makes an application get a 3-star average user rating ...
Significant changes in the structure and use of IT, including such seismic trends as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), virtualization and cloud computing, have introduced new challenges to IT administrators and staff. Added layers of complexity require new skill sets and knowledge bases as well as tools to effectively run a modern enterprise network. This raises a few questions about how IT teams are coping with the changes ...
“It must be the network!” Network administrators hear this phrase all too often when an application is slow, data transfer is not fast enough or VoIP calls drop. But it is not always the network that is to blame. The database, hardware and operating system are also common culprits. And a major cause of poor application performance can be the application itself. As a network administrator, though, try telling this to the application developer or systems administrator and you’ll find yourself engaged in an epic battle ...
The results are in from the latest version of Ipswitch’s annual Red Shirt Survey and the results highlight that IT network professionals are working harder than ever. To make matters worse, they are still feeling underappreciated and suffer from a general lack of respect within their organization ...
Real User Measurement (RUM) has been a go-to method for gaining insight as to how a site is performing at the last mile and whether end users encounter any errors or performance lags during their time on the site. Without the use of a Navigation Timing API, however, this insight is extremely shallow and leaves many stones unturned ...
IT is mandated to build and maintain IT environments with the highest possible availability, within budget and available resources. Challenges faced by IT Operations have intensified due to both the rapid growth in performance and event monitoring data volumes. As a result, for many IT organizations, especially with limited resources and with specialists wearing many hats, they often spend too much time fighting fires with “maintenance & support” and not enough time proactively avoiding issues like performance or availability problems. The amount of time IT Ops spends firefighting not only hurts the IT department, but innovation across the entire company. So how can the IT pro, who is fed up with just handling crisis after crisis, better leverage limited resources and get onto the important issues ...
Because the typical IT environment is comprised of hundreds of applications leveraging hundreds of platforms and networks, a new generation of Application Management software that is application- and platform-agnostic will become increasingly valuable. Here is what we believe are the five requirements of this new breed of software ...
