Are you are planning to implement new IT projects such as data center consolidation, server virtualization, cloud computing, or perhaps adding new applications on the network?  Do you understand exactly how these upgrades will affect the existing applications and the user experience?  What strategy are you going to use to ensure application performance is not compromised?  It is imperative that you understand how each of the components can affect overall application performance.

A Strategy you can use to Manage Application Performance (APM)

Most companies have some sort of visibility of their network systems via the network elements, but a healthy infrastructure does not necessarily mean that your applications are running efficiently because they do nothing to monitor the actual transaction.  There are many different components to APM, so what capabilities do you need to accurately monitor, measure, and troubleshoot?

6 Components of Application Monitoring

Monitoring the End-user Experience is quite different from Infrastructure Monitoring. We actually measure the end-user experience so we see what they see.

Measures response time and availability from the end user's perspective Aligns performance management with the needs of business users

Application Mapping is a separate dimension to APM this takes the different bits about applications and maps them together so you can trace an application and its dependencies/relationships across the network.

Discover application components and their relationships Fundamental for managing an application

Transaction Following/Tracing is a critical component is being able to trace transactions on the network through multiple servers that all communicate to make up an application.

Follow transactions through application tiers and components Trace performance of each transaction at the code level Holistic view of transactions from end-to-end

Deep Application Component Monitoring –  deep inside the system that runs the code allows you to get to the fine detail, and why there may be application issues.

Collect fine-grained metrics from application internals, including code-level performance Produce detail needed for real-time analytics and true root cause analysis Complemented by broad infrastructure performance information

Network-Aware APM – is another form of data collection because the network is where applications travel, and the network team usually gets called to solve problems first.

The network is the backplane of modern applications Understand impact of network performance on application behaviour Provides tracing and visibility for ALL applications

Analytics - There is a tremendous amount of information as you collect data across 100’s of applications and perhaps millions of transactions.  You need to collect and store that data efficiently to be able to trend, analyze, and solve problems with it

Store and index large amounts of performance data Automatically extract anomalous behaviour, correlate information, identify the root cause of problems, and predict events and performance trends Reveals valuable information to alert staff and resolve problems faster

With these 6 elements covered you will have complete visibility and will be able to effectively manage application performance and minimize user impact going forward.

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