Yes, You Should Do APM. Yes, It’s Getting Harder.
Application performance management (APM) is hard, but necessary. The vendor space is expanding because it addresses a real need.
In the old days when we ran everything on-premises in physical boxes, APM was already pretty hard. In the new world of cloud systems and micro-services, it’s only gotten harder.
The IT architecture of the present-day enterprise has become more complex. Many organizations run some workloads on-premises, and others in the cloud. Applications delivered through cloud-run workloads can integrate a smorgasbord of cloud services, abstracted from enterprise IT through another layer of interface, while running on the hardware in the cloud providers’ data centers.
Leading APM vendors have been evolving their products to address today’s new reality. Vendors such as IMB, Micro Focus, and Radware tout end-to-end solutions that help to diagnose and identify root causes of performance issues to ensure that availability meets SLAs.
- IBM Cloud APM includes predictive analytics that can help with forecasting for capacity planning.
- Micro Focus APM allows IT professionals to build “testing scripts based on real end user session data.”
- Radware APM allows for a “geo-location level” SLA, enabling “administrators to determine if there’s a problem with users from a specific region.”
Given the array of tools and the broad feature sets available, IT professionals need to gather requirements for their use cases in order to determine which features they can take advantage of.
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Our Take
Even as IT environments have become more complex, the expectations of end users have risen higher than ever. While before it was acceptable to bring down your website for maintenance every evening from 12am-1am, or for 8 hours on a Saturday, in today’s always-on, always-connected world, even brief outages risk alienating users.
With the complex state of IT workloads that interact to deliver services to customers, it’s very easy for things to go wrong, and for the user experience to suffer as a result.
True application performance management is necessary to ensure that customers receive the high quality service they expect from your organization.
IT professionals should be sure to understand their requirements and their use case to select and implement the APM solution that’s right for them.
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