Four Tips for Improving Application Performance Management
The growing use of software tools is allowing managed services providers (MSPs) to connect, provision and manage network components with unprecedented efficiency.
But the trend of more digital-enabled enterprises is increasingly revealing shortcomings in applications that aren’t optimized for such computing environments.
Ensuring that applications perform as intended is as important as ever, as client organizations seeking digital transformation aim to provide better customer experiences for end users.
“You simply can’t build a software-defined enterprise without a focus on application performance management,” said Paul Williams, director of software solutions for IT solutions provider Logicalis US. “You must have the ability to comprehensively monitor across the entire enterprise computing environment, quickly identify the root cause of a service disruption, and quickly remediate the issue to satisfy end users.”
This week, Logicalis US released a list of four practices they suggest IT professionals adopt as part of an application performance management scheme.
- Set a measurable baseline: Many organizations lack an empirical benchmark for how an application should perform. As a result, too many rely on human perception or the number of support calls to deduce that an application is not performing as desired. Logicalis experts recommend setting a baseline for application performance that is based on data and analytics.
- Shorten the time to resolution: Quickly identifying the root cause of the problem is essential but can be challenging. Often, the various component monitoring solutions in a network are not integrated. Network monitoring should begin at the end-user perspective and work back through the infrastructure, Logicalis experts said. The goal is to anticipate potential performance problems before they occur, allowing for proactive or automated remediation of issues.
- Employ Dev-Ops: A Dev-Ops strategy and related tooling can provide an organization with applications that are optimized for digital environments, helping to avoid performance problems in the first place. In-house coding can mean fewer defects and support issues down the line.
- Report on performance: Service providers should combine the benchmarking information with data about the supporting technologies, including the network, servers, storage, tuning and remediation procedures, with an eye toward continually improving performance and meeting service level agreements.
An application performance management strategy is essential in the age of software-defined networks, Logicalis officials said, as organizations seek more digitization while employing a variety of disparate technologies, from network infrastructure, to third-party tools to commercial off-the-shelf applications.
“Using application performance management software to better understand performance from the end users’ perspectives across hybrid environments, and then being able to proactively take action to ensure peak performance is delivered is becoming an IT operational requirement in the digital world,” Williams said.
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