Every customer running revenue-critical business applications should consider adding application performance monitoring and management. For this reason, we have taken our experience deploying application performance monitoring tools for our customers and released a standard managed solution. Our new Application Performance Management (APM) service, powered by AppDynamics, offers a “managed with” model in which we integrate APM with our customers’ managed hosting and cloud service. We handle the deployment, configuration, monitoring and assist clients with utilizing the APM solution.
Here are 5 important reasons to monitor your revenue-critical business applications.
1. Minimize the business impact of application issues
The more complex your application is, and the higher the rate of change, the more likely your applications will perform poorly or fail.
An effective troubleshooting process today prioritizes uptime over seeking answers, and uses the intelligence and alerting capabilities of a monitoring tool to help you mitigate business impact. When an outage occurs, you can use your application monitoring to quickly identify the problem and come up with a workaround that will get your app back up and running; later, when production is stable, you can consult with your developers and architects about how to improve the application and prevent problems going forward.
2. Find Ticking Time Bombs
Dealing with critical application issues quickly and effectively is key to minimizing the business impact of application failure. However, simply responding to outages is not enough. Smaller problems often go unresolved in applications because operation teams don’t have the time or resources to deal with them. Unfortunately, smaller issues can turn into major outages if they’re left unattended. So, enabling monitoring and identifying issues early is key.
3. Get to Know Your Application
When operations can’t troubleshoot a performance problem themselves, they often call in developers and architects to help. When you add up the man-hours spent fighting fires and the opportunity cost of not working on other projects, this is an expensive way to deal with problems.
To reduce the cost of troubleshooting, operations needs better visibility of their applications. The ops team needs to understand enough about the application that they won’t need to call in the experts to identify root cause. Ideally, ops can locate the root cause of problems quickly, and hand off to development with the right information and context for the fix.
4. Become More Agile
If your development team is agile, then you need to be agile, too. In most organizations the more nimble the development team, the more frequent the incidents. If constant code changes causes your application to perform poorly in production, then your organization isn’t recognizing the benefits of being agile. The solution isn’t to slow down your developers but rather to improve your own processes to better manage change. For some organizations, this means rethinking the way you identify issues.
5. Create Application Transparency for Everyone
Monitoring application performance in production can have effects that reach far beyond IT. The data that your monitoring tool collects represents how your users interact with your application. This data can help inform important decisions about performance-tuning projects, user-interface design, and product roadmap. With helpful, actionable data about your end users, you can change the course of your application and shape your organization’s culture.
Conclusion
Production doesn’t have to be a black box – nor should it be. Today’s applications are complex and dynamic, and the techniques we used to manage them in the past no longer work. This means you need the fastest and most effective way to troubleshoot and solve performance problems. The good news is, business application monitoring is now easier than ever. Check out our Layered Tech APM White Paper to find out how we can help you can crack open the black box.
For more information about our Application Performance Management service, please contact us or visit www.layeredtech.com/apm.
About the Author: As Vice President of Product Management at Layered Tech, Kevin Van Mondfrans (@VANMONDFRANS | +Kevin Van Mondfrans) is responsible for driving the Layered Tech portfolio of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and managed service offerings. With more than 20 years of experience product development and marketing, Kevin has been delivering innovative computing, storage, cloud and service offering with companies such as HP, Dell, and Savvis.
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