The world of healthcare information technology (IT) has
unique challenges. And hospital IT
managers are under significant pressure to meet these challenges. The pressure originates
from many sides-government regulations, the increasing volume of electronic medical
records, revenue cycle management, etc. Determining
solutions to ensure these pressures are
relieved is a considerable part of the mission healthcare IT has taken on.
There are many terms in use by healthcare IT professionals
today regarding optimal IT application management. Business transaction
management (BTM). Business transaction monitoring. Business transaction
performance (BTP). Complex event processing (CEP). Application performance
management (APM). Application performance monitoring. All of these terms are
interrelated and describe differing sides of the complex process of ensuring IT
is effective in its mission to serve the business, regardless of how complex
the system is. However, sorting out the differences can be a challenge.
What is the difference between application performance management and
application performance monitoring?
Application performance management (APM) software is
multi-faceted solution that provides hospital IT managers with multiple tools
for evaluating, monitoring and managing the availability, performance,
configuration, updating and provisioning of their increasingly complex IT business
applications. This can include: application dependency discovery, patch
management, change and configuration management, operational resource
monitoring, business transaction monitoring, business transaction management and
application performance monitoring. Often you will see these terms used almost
interchangeably, because their functions often overlap.
Application performance monitoring is a facet of application
performance management. It encompasses business transaction management and
business transaction monitoring. Application performance monitoring (also
abbreviated APM) includes the use of instrumentation to capture events and
metrics and an application performance monitoring database that stores
historical application data and enables dynamic queries. It also provides a dashboard to present the
data analysis. Typically, application performance monitoring is used to detect
response time problems, bottlenecks, failures and application availability
issues. It also determines the root
cause of these failures and degradations, alerts IT about them and sometimes makes
automated responses to resolve them.
Many application
performance monitoring solutions enable application component discovery and provide
visualization of the applications that were discovered. In the process, the
exact location at which a problem is occurring is presented. Deep dive application performance monitoring
gives 360° visibility into every application crossing through the multiple
tiers commonly present in an IT enterprise. It gives a vital health snapshot of
how the separate components of the enterprise are interacting with each other.
How is business transaction monitoring related to business transaction
management?
These two terms are frequently interchanged with each
other. But, a management solution would
imply that the product actively initiates changes to the IT environment
supporting these transactions. However,
in practice most technology vendors providing these solutions are really
providing a monitoring only solution with little to no management capabilities. IT professionals can consider these terms to
both mean the same thing - monitoring the performance of the logical units of
work in business applications that are referred to as transactions.
How is business transaction monitoring related to application performance
monitoring?
In theory application performance monitoring as defined by
the Gartner Group includes business transaction monitoring. Gartner refers to this as transaction
profiling. However, many application
performance monitoring solutions do not include business transaction monitoring. At the
same time, many business transaction performance solutions do not provide a
complete picture of application performance within the IT enterprise and only
focus on the transaction. The
unfortunate side-effect of this is that while the business transaction
monitoring solution may detect a problem, it is often unable to explain why
this has occurred...
Why is a complex event processing engine needed for application performance
monitoring?
Application performance monitoring generates incredible
volumes of data that is humanly impossible to correlate. This is why
application performance monitoring depends heavily on complex event processing
(CEP). A CEP engine can be utilized to perform many different functions, but
one of the most important is the ability to rapidly search through a large
volume of events and metrics from many sources and detect the patterns that
denote an application performance problem.
This means that not only can each application's performance
be monitored; meaning can be applied to the interaction between applications
that together realize a business process. A complex event processing engine is
the foundation of providing early warnings and alerts that performance is degrading
or potential problems are developing.
How important is application performance monitoring to a hospital's bottom
line?
Research suggests that 24% of IT time is dedicated to
troubleshooting application issues. When an IT enterprise has all applications
under constant monitoring, troubleshooting and resolution time, or the MTTR
(mean time to repair), is reduced significantly. Rather than wasting 24% of the
IT time on resolving application issues which affect the efficiency of the
entire hospital (thus causing untold stealth waste costs), these costs can be
reduced so low they no longer have a major impact on any aspect of the
hospital's operations. And in this way,
IT staff can be available to help grow the business and not just fix the
infrastructure.
What makes Nastel's AutoPilot different from other application performance
monitoring solutions?
Nastel has designed their application performance monitoring
solution, AutoPilot around a complex
event processing (CEP) core, rather than adding it as a separate module. Think
of it as the "brain". While some other
competing solutions are now offering a CEP engine, they do this as an outboard,
add-on module - think "optional brain".
The reason behind Nastel's approach of building AutoPilot on
top of a CEP engine is that this enables expansion of AutoPilot to predict and
even prevent problems. Nastel added a
governance layer on top of CEP that can dynamically describe complex sets of
events and metrics as situations and prevent them from ever happening
again. AutoPilot is designed to
integrate information across all of the separate tiers typical in today's IT
configurations, distributed and mainframe from the datacenter to the cloud.
Nastel's AutoPilot monitors and correlates information
from all tiers and provides a 360°, fully transparent view of how all the
applications, middleware and transactions are performing. Many hospitals have
discovered the benefits of using AutoPilot's application
performance monitoring capabilities. They have found that installing
AutoPilot as part of their IT management strategy has saved thousands of
dollars, not only in IT costs, but in other costs related to providing medical
care. More than just saving money,
AutoPilot's ability to predict and prevent problems frees up IT staff to work
on adding new services and in effect help grow the business.
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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