Vendor Forum
Network performance monitoring (NPM) has been around a long time. Unlike APM, NPM is still in the process of catching up to cloud realities. In May of this year, Gartner published a research note entitled Network Performance Monitoring Tools Leave Gaps in Cloud Monitoring. It's a fairly biting critique of the NPM space that says, essentially, that the vast majority of current NPM approaches were largely built for a pre-cloud era. As a result, network managers are left in the lurch when trying to adapt to the realities of digital operations ...
While the layers of abstraction created in virtualized environments afford numerous advantages, they can also obscure how the virtual resources are best allocated and how physical resources are performing. This can make maintaining optimal application performance a never-ending exercise in trial-and-error. This post highlights some of the challenges encountered when using traditional monitoring and analytics tools, and describes how machine learning, as a next-generation analytics platform, provides a better way to meet SLAs by finding and fixing issues before they become performance problems ...
New surveys by SolarWinds demonstrate the mounting responsibility being placed on the modern IT professional. With the second annual IT Professionals Day upon us, these survey results are particularly timely as they emphasize the need for greater appreciation towards you, the IT professionals of the world, and the critical role you play not only in modern business, but in the lives of nearly all technology end users ...
There comes a time when the vendors that serve every subset of the IT industry need to forgo self-interest and put aside competitive drivers to do whatever it takes to advance the cause of the user. Thankfully, such an effort to bring together providers of critical technology to benefit customer implementation has already emerged ...
On the first Sunday of the NFL season, ESPN's fantasy football app crashed. We see these types of stories often during so-called "surge" events, like when Black Friday takes down a retailer. Why? Often, it's the database that's been swamped in the process ...
Today’s native digital generations prefer to work on digital channels versus in-person channels. This ongoing trend has given rise to improvements in customer service, where interactions are delivered across multiple digital channels, ranging from social channels like Twitter and Facebook to text and voice communications. However, there is still more work to be done to unify these platforms more seamlessly ...
SSL certificates confirm that a web page is equipped with secured data exchange. Site visitors can therefore see at first glance whether they are on the site of a trustworthy provider. In addition, SSL certificates also increase the findability of a page on Google and operators benefit from an improved SEO ranking. Following this principle, this is how SSL certificates work ...
Time is an important measurement of IT service, especially if we use transaction time. Time is well understood and begins to answer some of the fuzzy questions such as slowness and what is performance. Of course there are other great questions in IT and one of the most dreaded is: "How much does this application cost?" This question creates countless man hours of work quickly running into the diminished returns of hours spent vs. accuracy ...
As the market matures and technology evolves, today in 2016 the myriad of connected "things" are every bit a part of the Internet as iPhones and Netflix. But with the 50 billion devices we expect to see connected by 2020, comes a wide array of new challenges ...
Do you know how much your organization risks with every potential outage? This infographic outlines the true cost of downtime ...
The cloud revolution has affected all facets of the IT realm, including network and application monitoring. SNMP monitoring gives us the status of our devices, but doesn’t capture the end-user experience. We need to know what users experience regardless of what device, network and ISP connects them to cloud applications ...
What is needed to create a next-generation network management tool? Nothing less than the development of a sophisticated network-aware orchestration engine that is able to detect any interdependencies, resolve them and deploy network policies automatically over the network ...
The challenge today for network operations (NetOps) is how to maintain and evolve the network while demand for network services continues to grow. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) promises to make the network more agile and adaptable. Various solutions exist, yet most are missing a layer to orchestrate new features and policies in a standardized, automated and replicable manner while providing sufficient customization to meet enterprise-level requirements ...
ScaleArc's Summer Blockbuster Survey found that 62 percent of Americans said they would be upset if they were purchasing movie tickets and the site or app went down, and 90 percent agreed that movie ticketing websites and apps should have no downtime this summer ...
Monitoring your middleware platforms with a consolidated monitoring application has been shown over and over to reduce the frequency and duration of severity 1 and 2 incidents and prevent losses of revenue attributed to downtime. However, making a strong business care for end-end monitoring and middleware monitoring can be challenging and can present unique learning opportunities. Here are some recommendations to help you make a better business case ...
As machine and IT event data continue to become more complex – and massively abundant – IT departments are trying to manage a plethora of information. In many cases, IT departments – as well as business practice groups – manage IT data by silo, each concerned solely about their particular piece of the puzzle, and not focusing on the whole picture required to understand where their piece fits ...
One way top-tier e-commerce companies maintain their prestige and keep customers coming back is by delivering an exceptional customer experience. Users can depend on these sites for fast, reliable web interactions, and speedy and convenient transactions. Catchpoint just analyzed and ranked the top performing e-commerce companies and one thing is clear – they all make performance optimization a priority. The top three performers – Target, Apple and Walgreens – shared best practices that have allowed them to achieve their competitive edge ...
Web application load times can make the difference between your e-business thriving or dying. Speedy load times are so essential to a web application’s success that they should be considered a key performance indicator ...
I’ve heard people say that they are super busy with production deployments and fast-moving projects. They haven’t had much time to think about a performance monitoring strategy for their new applications. But waiting until your applications are already in production is a mistake. However, it’s one that you can avoid. Develop, test and deploy your applications with monitoring already in place and save yourself a lot of headaches. Let me count the ways ...
How many of us IT professionals have been in a meeting similar to this: The chairs of various departments throughout the company are sitting around a long table and are giving a monthly summary. IT presents that the applications, network and servers were some amount of 9’s available and may explain an outage. The meeting goes on and then one of the heads explains a failure to meet department goals by stating some application was "slow" ...
