Five Best Practices for APM in the Digital Economy
This e-book presents five best practices for APM
to enable this app-centric view of infrastructure,
including:
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Embrace the philosophy of app-centric
infrastructure monitoring to drive cultural
change in IT
Perform ongoing synthetic transaction
management to identify potential problems
before they impact the business
Identify and track usage trends around
KPIs like response time and number of
transactions by region using passive enduser experience monitoring
Use active end-user experience
monitoring for real-time, real-world visibility
into actual user interactions
Discover and map complete app topologies
to enable fine-grained monitoring of
resource consumption per app
By following these practices, IT can better
manage performance in rapidly changing
environments to meet the needs of digital
business stakeholders and their customers
The strategic importance
of application performance
Customers don’t care about IT infrastructure.
All that matters to them is that the services
they rely on will be there when they need
them—with the high performance and
outstanding experience they deserve.
Meeting that expectation is critical for digital business
success. If a retailer’s e-commerce platform is running slowly,
shoppers will lose patience and abandon their carts. If a home
healthcare provider is unable to check in on time at a patient
location using a mobile app, the company may face a financial
penalty. A stalled analytics app can delay the completion of
a strategic plan—while leading business decision-makers to
question the ability of IT to support the next phase of the
company’s digital transformation.
As customer experience takes on utmost importance for
customer satisfaction, company revenue, cost, and risk, it has
also become increasingly difficult to ensure. As businesses of
all kinds pursue rapid innovation, IDC predicts that by 2018, 70
percent of infrastructure will be related to digital transformation.¹
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This shift is resulting in a complex landscape of packaged, webbased, and microservices-based apps built on legacy, modern,
and emerging architectural standards. At the same time, DevOps
is pushing more changes into production, more quickly than
ever before. Add it all up, and, in the words of Gartner, “Most
IT groups are unable to keep up with the growing demand for
high-performance end-user experiences that are required for
successful digital business transformation initiatives.”²
To maintain optimal performance and prevent changes from
causing problems, IT operations teams and app owners need
a way to gain visibility into the entire app ecosystem, from
infrastructure and code to the front end, and understand its
real-time impact on the customer experience being provided.
This context is essential to help set priorities and identify the
most urgent problems to address—those with the potential
to lower revenue, incur penalties, increase risk, or incur higher
operating costs. Will a heavily promoted new online service run
unacceptably slowly? Will clinicians be unable to enter patient
information into the system? Will contractor paychecks be
delayed? Will customer SLAs be violated? Should IT walk—or
should it run?
¹ IDC, IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Enterprise Infrastructure 2016 Predictions, Nov 2015.
² Gartner, Market Guide for Performance Testing, Sept. 21, 2015.
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