Optimal application performance has become an essential part of both the customer experience and internal operations. Customer-facing applications that fail to meet user expectations are quickly abandoned, which is costly in terms of closing sales, understanding customer behavior, and maintaining customer loyalty. From an operational standpoint, performance issues with internal business applications can drag down productivity and efficiency, hamper collaboration, and frustrate employees. Organizations need to maximize application performance in order to maximize their return on investments in technology and people.
Application performance management is a discipline that involves monitoring applications, ensuring high performance and availability, and detecting any issues before they affect the user experience. It provides the tools and framework through IT can ensure that critical services are delivered in a way that creates the highest possible business value.
Application performance monitoring (APM) tools provide visibility into application performance from the user’s perspective, measuring how quickly transactions are completed and data is delivered. When bottlenecks are discovered, APM tools trace the problem to the root cause, identify the best possible fix, and create reports for analysis.
Instead of reacting to problems after damage has been done, APM tools help prevent problems from occurring. That means fewer complaints from users and customers and less time spent firefighting. Through performance trends analysis, IT can better understand and handle highly dynamic workloads and make smarter, more cost-effective infrastructure upgrades. APM tools also enable organizations to monitor customer behavior and provide valuable data that can be used to optimize the customer experience, reduce errors, and improve uptime and conversion rates.
Related to APM is application-aware network performance monitoring, which uses deep packet inspection and data analysis to show how network performance is affecting the performance of applications and services. While APM provides visibility from the user perspective, application-aware network performance monitoring provides visibility from a network perspective, thus playing a critical role in proactive management and rapid problem resolution.
The growing emphasis placed upon application performance, as well as the need to harness the power of mobility, DevOps, the cloud and big data, are driving demand for APM technology. It’s no longer enough for your applications to be working and your network to be operational. They need to be working well. Let Technologent show you how APM and application-aware network performance monitoring tools can be integrated into your network to enhance the customer experience and boost productivity and efficiency.
