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: 3 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 4 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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