Why Measure Application Performance
Today’s business applications depend on a complex mix of network infrastructure, software, and multi-server environments. Infrastructure is becoming far more complicated due to trends such as virtualization, service oriented architectures, and cloud computing, and although they all come with distinct benefits, they are also changing the way that application performance can be measured. In order to understand how an application is performing you need to measure the user experience end to end. It is absolutely essential that you have visibility of the entire transaction and be able to use the data to baseline performance over time using actual business transactions. When the transaction times start to deviate from normal you can begin forensics, most times even before users are affected. If you consistently receive early warning you can quickly determine where the degradation is occurring and you will substantially reduce Mean Time to Repair (MTTR).
Benefits of an Application Performance Management System
- Monitor user experience, and alert on SLA violations as soon as they happen, and before they are critical
- Trending and historical views of application performance over time.
- Accelerate troubleshooting and remediation
- Eliminate “finger-pointing” among teams, promoting cooperative approaches to solving problem
- Detect early warnings signs of performance problems, and take preventive action.
- Understand the relationship among applications and infrastructure components
- Make informed decisions about infrastructure improvements related to application performance
- Reduce the risk of delay or catastrophic failure by verifying and acting on the root cause.