If your business is like most today, you have become
dependent on using software applications to help run your business. From
applications that process customer orders to applications that tabulate your
inventory to applications that track email, more and more businesses are in a
position where they could not survive without technology.
Of course, the reason that all this technology was put into
place originally was to save your company money. The question is whether the
applications you are using are boosting profits or creating a steady drain on
the bottom line. You could easily be among the 60% of businesses that find
their lack of application performance monitoring is costing them 9% of their
corporate revenues.
What are the costs of poor application performance?
That 9% impact on revenue comes from several channels.
1)
A company may be unable to identify issues
before end users are impacted
2)
A company may be constantly upgrading IT system
designs yet not experiencing the hoped for improvement.
3)
A company encounters difficulty after installing
a new application because it wasn't able to pre-test the new applications
before implementing them.
4)
A company may experience declining employee
satisfaction due to the stress caused by constantly dealing with unhappy
customers or not having the information needed to correct problems before they
become mission critical.
5)
A company may believe they have a performance
problem, spend lots of time trying to resolve it without results - but due to
lack of sufficient visibility they are unaware it is really a design flaw.
The failure of business critical applications to perform
their essential duties can be costly, yet not installing these applications is
also costly and most likely impossible. It would be extremely difficult for a
business to comply with things like service level agreements (SLAs), promised
order processing times, and other business critical processes without business software
application once they reach a certain size.
What is the solution to the poor application performance problem?
There are several solutions, some less productive than
others. Throwing more money into the IT department isn't a complete answer as
most businesses have discovered. Rather, the best solution works, on the
following four principles-Identify, Detect, Correlate, Notify. The goal is to
catch symptoms early, before they have time to escalate into user impacting
events.
Identify
It isn't unusual for a business to have numerous business
critical applications so identifying what those applications are and how they
work is crucial to resolving poor application performance issues. This is where
business transaction performance comes into play. Before any improvement in the
performance of business applications can begin, all the mainframe components
and distributed applications must be discovered, analyzed and catalogued.
Detect
Many business applications provide health reports on the functioning
of the specific application. Unfortunately, because these applications do not
monitor the behaviors of their companion applications, it is easy to conclude
falsely that all is going well. Detection begins with the ability to deep-dive
into all your business applications to see their components, dependencies and states. In other
words, answer the questions: 1) What is running? 2) When is it running? And 3)
Where is it running?
Correlate
Many a company may blame their poor application performance
on an overburdened network bandwidth, when in reality the problem may have a
completely different source. This is where correlation comes in. The
applications have been identified. How transactions are flowing through the IT
environment has been tracked. Now the what, when and where is correlated to
answer the question, "Why?"
Notify
None of this would save the business any money unless
someone knows there is a problem developing. This is why notification is an
important component of application performance management.
Anytime a business can keep the mean time between problem occurrence
and problem awareness short, it reduces costs associated with major customer
impacting problems.
Application Performance Management Solution
Nastel's AutoPilot is an APM solution that identifies,
detects, correlates, and notifies. AutoPilot does this through its complex
event processing (CEP) engine design. The CEP engine correlates all the deep-dive
information it captures from transactions, applications, business activities
and middleware. The software is designed to identify exactly when, where and
why a process has veered from business normal to business abnormal. Having
these questions answered early accelerates the time to repair.
AutoPilot offers all the features expected in an application
performance management product. Its ability to make the performance of
applications visible from end-to-end means your business can put a stop to poor
application performance resource drainage.
Denise Rutledge enjoys researching and writing about
technology products. She writes on many financial and business topics,
including software solutions that impact business performance in the financial
industry. In addition to working with clients to develop website content,
she writes on how to make a living as a writer on her writing blog.
Denise Rutledge enjoys researching and writing about
technology products. She writes on many financial and business topics,
including software solutions that impact business performance in the financial
industry. In addition to working with clients to develop website content,
she writes on how to make a living as a writer on her writing blog.
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